Wifi Card okay for gaming?

Open a command prompt and ping your router's IP address a hundred times or so:

C:\Users\mrab>ping -n 100 192.168.1.1

Pinging 192.168.1.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
...

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.1:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

That will show you the latency between your PC and the wifi to your router. If you see it bounce around a lot, then yeah it could cause intermittent lag. I guess it depends on how bad it is and how serious you are about your gaming. But if it matters that much, the real answer is to go wired.
 
MRAB54 said:
Open a command prompt and ping your router's IP address a hundred times or so:

C:\Users\mrab>ping -n 100 192.168.1.1

Pinging 192.168.1.1 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time<1ms TTL=64
...

Ping statistics for 192.168.1.1:
Packets: Sent = 100, Received = 100, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 0ms, Average = 0ms

That will show you the latency between your PC and the wifi to your router. If you see it bounce around a lot, then yeah it could cause intermittent lag. I guess it depends on how bad it is and how serious you are about your gaming. But if it matters that much, the real answer is to go wired.
Click to expand...

I don't know why I didn't think of pinging the router, duh. Thanks for that!

Using a USB 2.0 external dongle wifi adapter with an antenna, I got all 1ms returns except for about three 3ms and one 4ms. So about 96 were 1ms.

Using my ASUS internal PCIe card with 2 antenna , I got about the same results.

Both on the same machine.
Edit: And no packet loss,of course.
 
Last edited:
It depends on how many packets your games are using.

A ping test to the router is not necessarily going to show what it will perform like in-game.

As long as you are the only one using the wireless it probably will be ok.

I would use the PCIe one as USB can get dodgy as far as latency goes. You could always up the polling rate for the USB though.

If you do use USB, make sure nothing else is using the same USB controller.
 
cyclone3d said:
It depends on how many packets your games are using.

A ping test to the router is not necessarily going to show what it will perform like in-game.

As long as you are the only one using the wireless it probably will be ok.

I would use the PCIe one as USB can get dodgy as far as latency goes. You could always up the polling rate for the USB though.

If you do use USB, make sure nothing else is using the same USB controller.
Click to expand...
Yeah true, polling isn't loaded. When you say make sure nothing else is using the controller, you mean don't plug any hubs into the USB port, but only use the USB device in the port itself? If so, yes I understand.

What would be the best way to monitor the game when I am playing so I can look after to see if there were any lost packets or other problems regarding the USB wifi adapter?

Is there a way to CMD polling with a specific size packet?

Also, what or how does USB get dodgy with latency? I'm assuming you mean with other demands on it from being a shared port or something similar? I'm just wondering now, even if you plug it into a dedicated USB port from the MB header, it could still be sharing IRQs with other MB needs?
 
A lot of time, your motherboard will have multiple USB controllers with multiple ports hooked up to each controller. (Your motherboard has built-in USB hubs). Using an external hub could increase latency even more.

So if you are plugging multiple things into the same motherboard USB Controller/Hub, then you run the risk of affecting latency since USB is a serial device.

Some games have console commands to enable onscreen monitoring of latency, fps, GPU load, CPU load, etc.

I don't think there is a way to set the packet size for USB.

Yeah, if you run multiple things on the same controller/hub such as keyboard or mouse while you are gaming, the extra devices can increase latency since they are all sharing the same bandwidth and a frame normally only happens once every millisecond. So.. if you have the wifi controller, a mouse, and a keyboard all hooked up to the same USB controller, you are getting a minimum of 1ms delay for each frame/packet (if only one device is being used) up to who knows whatever if you are using more than one device actively. Just depends on the timing of when the polling picks up information being sent to/from the devices that are hooked up.

https://computer.howstuffworks.com/usb3.htm

https://www.geoffknagge.com/uni/elec101/essay.shtml

Basically, USB sucks if you want consistent latency for devices hooked up to it. Back when all the mfgs when from real MIDI interfaces to USB based MIDI interfaces, the latency and accurate timing went completely out of whack for people recording music. Parallel , serial, and dedicated MPU-401 style interfaces were all way better for that purpose but the industry pretty much said screw you all and stopped making and supporting the interfaces and devices that actually worked really well and instead stuck everybody with having to deal with USB.

This was able to be partially mitigated by upping the USB polling rate and even disabling core parking in Windows.
 
DWD1961 said:
Yeah true, polling isn't loaded. When you say make sure nothing else is using the controller, you mean don't plug any hubs into the USB port, but only use the USB device in the port itself? If so, yes I understand.

What would be the best way to monitor the game when I am playing so I can look after to see if there were any lost packets or other problems regarding the USB wifi adapter?

Is there a way to CMD polling with a specific size packet?
Click to expand...
cyclone3d said:
A lot of time, your motherboard will have multiple USB controllers with multiple ports hooked up to each controller. (Your motherboard has built-in USB hubs). Using an external hub could increase latency even more.

So if you are plugging multiple things into the same motherboard USB Controller/Hub, then you run the risk of affecting latency since USB is a serial device.

Some games have console commands to enable onscreen monitoring of latency, fps, GPU load, CPU load, etc.

I don't think there is a way to set the packet size for USB.

Yeah, if you run multiple things on the same controller/hub such as keyboard or mouse while you are gaming, the extra devices can increase latency since they are all sharing the same bandwidth and a frame normally only happens once every millisecond. So.. if you have the wifi controller, a mouse, and a keyboard all hooked up to the same USB controller, you are getting a minimum of 1ms delay for each frame/packet (if only one device is being used) up to who knows whatever if you are using more than one device actively. Just depends on the timing of when the polling picks up information being sent to/from the devices that are hooked up.

https://computer.howstuffworks.com/usb3.htm

https://www.geoffknagge.com/uni/elec101/essay.shtml

Basically, USB sucks if you want consistent latency for devices hooked up to it. Back when all the mfgs when from real MIDI interfaces to USB based MIDI interfaces, the latency and accurate timing went completely out of whack for people recording music. Parallel , serial, and dedicated MPU-401 style interfaces were all way better for that purpose but the industry pretty much said screw you all and stopped making and supporting the interfaces and devices that actually worked really well and instead stuck everybody with having to deal with USB.

This was able to be partially mitigated by upping the USB polling rate and even disabling core parking in Windows.
Click to expand...

Is there anyway to see what ports are linked to what controllers? That way i could plug my USB key and mouse into different ports than the wifi adapter. For now I'll just put the key and mouse as far from the port where the wifi adapter is. I guess I can look in device manafger and see how many controllers tehre are and then get a general idea of how many are assigned to each header? Can I use device manager ot increase polling on each USB controller?
 
DWD1961 said:
Is there anyway to see what ports are linked to what controllers? That way i could plug my USB key and mouse into different ports than the wifi adapter. For now I'll just put the key and mouse as far from the port where the wifi adapter is. I guess I can look in device manafger and see how many controllers tehre are and then get a general idea of how many are assigned to each header? Can I use device manager ot increase polling on each USB controller?
Click to expand...
In another thread, one reason I want to move to another adapter and I am using that little USB 2 adapter now is because I am getting audio stuttering/Bzzt bzzzt sound when the ASUS card in enabled and connected. This should be interesting to you. I just polled the ASUS PCIe card and this is what I got:
Capture.PNG

As you can see, something is VERY wrong.
I'm going to post this in the other thread, so you might want to replay there instead of here:
https://hardforum.com/threads/wfi-adaptors-usb-vs-pcie.1991083/#post-1044449560
 
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