Best WiFi Routers for Gaming?

[Randy Marsh]

I’m interested, if they make any difference?

[vadim]

Azza ☠님이 먼저 게시:

I tried explaining the terms.

Plus I would NEVER personally wifi game without them.

To clarify:

A normal wifi signal goes outward in a circle falling downward. Therefore you NEED the wifi router in the middle at a high point.

Having something like Beamforming, stops that signal waste from going in just a circle, but rather directs it towards the device using it. The other device just needs to also support it on it's end. Ensure your gaming PC wifi card supports Beamforming, else it will just default to normal. Most smartphones and later devices will support it these days.

However, you might have multiple devices. Therefore you have tri-band signals. Therefore 3-6 devices could happily work together on one wifi router without blocking and waiting upon each other. The 5GHz signal could be always directly focused towards the gaming PC, while the others move around, perhaps following a smartphone, etc. This works best if the wifi router has a duel or quad-core processor to keep up and can perform multiple tasks at the same time.

However, if you have multiple devices, you also want to setup QoS (quality of service). That gives the wifi signals priority. So with that you can set your online gaming as #1 priority, then online streaming of movies as the #2, downloading as #3, going down to web-browsing as #4, emails as #5. You can make your main gaming PC as #1 priority too and other devices such as your smartphone lower priority. This prevents any bottle-necking or hogging. Consider if your little brother is watching Youtube and your in the middle of an online match. By default, that would lag you seriously out. With QoS, the game still gets #1 priority and the youtube will just have to buffer a bit more if low on bandwidth instead.

Sorry, but you tried to answer only about half of my questions, your answers mostly make no sense and, as far as I can see, you either was misinformed by someone or just express your imagination instead of real info.
First, you need to have array of antennas to beamforming. So, can you, please, name these "most smartphones" that supports beamforming. You can't? What's a pity.
That is because they don't support it. Why? Because of obvious reason: you need to have seversl antennas for every spatial stream and these array allow you to amplify the signal only in the direction perpendicular to the antennas. Smartphones just have no enough room inside for multiple antennas.
The same about "gaming PC wifi card". Beamforming is fairly useless technology, so very few wifi adapters support it. Probably you just don't understand how it supposed to work.

Your statement about dual and quad core CPUs sounds funny. Router performance has nothing to do with number of CPU cores.
You clearly do not know what QoS is. QoS works on egress traffic only. You can not prioritize ingress traffic. This should be pretty obvious. And so on.

[Morphic]

vadim님이 먼저 게시:

Sorry, but you tried to answer only about half of my questions, your answers mostly make no sense and, as far as I can see, you either was misinformed by someone or just express your imagination instead of real info.
First, you need to have array of antennas to beamforming. So, can you, please, name these "most smartphones" that supports beamforming. You can't? What's a pity.

Any Smartphone with 802.11ac specifications should be able to make use of Beamforming. Technically 802.11n also has it but you needed both devices to support Beamforming and they typically had to be from the same manufacturer.

https://www.howtogeek.com/220774/htg-explains-what-is-beamforming-on-a-wireless-router/

Also don't forget the Beamforming was starting to be introduced as early as 2012 and really began rolling out in 2014 when MU-MIMO began rolling.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/wi-fi-networks-are-wasting-a-gigabit-but-multi-user-beamforming-will-save-the-day/

vadim님이 먼저 게시:

That is because they don't support it. Why? Because of obvious reason: you need to have seversl antennas for every spatial stream and these array allow you to amplify the signal only in the direction perpendicular to the antennas. Smartphones just have no enough room inside for multiple antennas.
The same about "gaming PC wifi card". Beamforming is fairly useless technology, so very few wifi adapters support it. Probably you just don't understand how it supposed to work.

And yet manufacturers have been trying to fit more and more antennas into small devices, like Smartphones... Just look at the HTC One phone line and what they did for design for their Antennas. Pretty much any non-metallic line was for the Antennas to radiate.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/building-smartphone-antennas-that-play-nice-together

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3256905/mobile-wireless/13-things-you-need-to-know-about-mu-mimo-wi-fi.html

If a smartphone has an LTE or MIMO capable antenna in it, it can probably use Beamforming. How well it can is a different story....

vadim님이 먼저 게시:

Your statement about dual and quad core CPUs sounds funny. Router performance has nothing to do with number of CPU cores.
You clearly do not know what QoS is. QoS works on egress traffic only. You can not prioritize ingress traffic. This should be pretty obvious. And so on.

Yeah I'm confused as well about those comments.

[TehSpoopyKitteh]

Morphic님이 먼저 게시:

vadim님이 먼저 게시:

Sorry, but you tried to answer only about half of my questions, your answers mostly make no sense and, as far as I can see, you either was misinformed by someone or just express your imagination instead of real info.
First, you need to have array of antennas to beamforming. So, can you, please, name these "most smartphones" that supports beamforming. You can't? What's a pity.

Any Smartphone with 802.11ac specifications should be able to make use of Beamforming. Technically 802.11n also has it but you needed both devices to support Beamforming and they typically had to be from the same manufacturer.

https://www.howtogeek.com/220774/htg-explains-what-is-beamforming-on-a-wireless-router/

Also don't forget the Beamforming was starting to be introduced as early as 2012 and really began rolling out in 2014 when MU-MIMO began rolling.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/wi-fi-networks-are-wasting-a-gigabit-but-multi-user-beamforming-will-save-the-day/

vadim님이 먼저 게시:

That is because they don't support it. Why? Because of obvious reason: you need to have seversl antennas for every spatial stream and these array allow you to amplify the signal only in the direction perpendicular to the antennas. Smartphones just have no enough room inside for multiple antennas.
The same about "gaming PC wifi card". Beamforming is fairly useless technology, so very few wifi adapters support it. Probably you just don't understand how it supposed to work.

And yet manufacturers have been trying to fit more and more antennas into small devices, like Smartphones... Just look at the HTC One phone line and what they did for design for their Antennas. Pretty much any non-metallic line was for the Antennas to radiate.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/building-smartphone-antennas-that-play-nice-together

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3256905/mobile-wireless/13-things-you-need-to-know-about-mu-mimo-wi-fi.html

If a smartphone has an LTE or MIMO capable antenna in it, it can probably use Beamforming. How well it can is a different story....

vadim님이 먼저 게시:

Your statement about dual and quad core CPUs sounds funny. Router performance has nothing to do with number of CPU cores.
You clearly do not know what QoS is. QoS works on egress traffic only. You can not prioritize ingress traffic. This should be pretty obvious. And so on.

Yeah I'm confused as well about those comments.

More cores and CPU’s in a Wifi router, the more it can handle a certain amount of devices connected to it with reasonable connectivity.

If I had a choice between two routers rated at the same speed, I would chose the one with the faster CPU. Look at how a router processes data, you’ll see why in larger deployments, it’s better to have multithreaded CPU’s in the router.

[Azza ☠]

;1798529872649636373님이 먼저 게시:

Azza ☠님이 먼저 게시:

I tried explaining the terms.

Plus I would NEVER personally wifi game without them.

To clarify:

A normal wifi signal goes outward in a circle falling downward. Therefore you NEED the wifi router in the middle at a high point.

Having something like Beamforming, stops that signal waste from going in just a circle, but rather directs it towards the device using it. The other device just needs to also support it on it's end. Ensure your gaming PC wifi card supports Beamforming, else it will just default to normal. Most smartphones and later devices will support it these days.

However, you might have multiple devices. Therefore you have tri-band signals. Therefore 3-6 devices could happily work together on one wifi router without blocking and waiting upon each other. The 5GHz signal could be always directly focused towards the gaming PC, while the others move around, perhaps following a smartphone, etc. This works best if the wifi router has a duel or quad-core processor to keep up and can perform multiple tasks at the same time.

However, if you have multiple devices, you also want to setup QoS (quality of service). That gives the wifi signals priority. So with that you can set your online gaming as #1 priority, then online streaming of movies as the #2, downloading as #3, going down to web-browsing as #4, emails as #5. You can make your main gaming PC as #1 priority too and other devices such as your smartphone lower priority. This prevents any bottle-necking or hogging. Consider if your little brother is watching Youtube and your in the middle of an online match. By default, that would lag you seriously out. With QoS, the game still gets #1 priority and the youtube will just have to buffer a bit more if low on bandwidth instead.

Sorry, but you tried to answer only about half of my questions, your answers mostly make no sense and, as far as I can see, you either was misinformed by someone or just express your imagination instead of real info.
First, you need to have array of antennas to beamforming. So, can you, please, name these "most smartphones" that supports beamforming. You can't? What's a pity.
That is because they don't support it. Why? Because of obvious reason: you need to have seversl antennas for every spatial stream and these array allow you to amplify the signal only in the direction perpendicular to the antennas. Smartphones just have no enough room inside for multiple antennas.
The same about "gaming PC wifi card". Beamforming is fairly useless technology, so very few wifi adapters support it. Probably you just don't understand how it supposed to work.

Your statement about dual and quad core CPUs sounds funny. Router performance has nothing to do with number of CPU cores.
You clearly do not know what QoS is. QoS works on egress traffic only. You can not prioritize ingress traffic. This should be pretty obvious. And so on.

You want a Beamforming wifi router with MU-MIMO (Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output).

The router can then talk to multiple devices(smartphones, tablets, computers) at the same time. One antennae can be used to connect to your smartphone while at the same time the other one can connect to the Smart TV or laptop.

Now say you have the Samsung Galaxy S7 or higher, it supports 2x2 MU-MIMO connectivity and will happily work with beamforming. You could be walking around the house and upstairs, etc. The beam will be more direct to it, rather than having so many dropouts and deadzone.

As for the duel-core or quad-core, each core is isolated in wifi tasks, meaning it can handle multiple send/receive requests faster without as much delay/blockage waiting on something else also making a request.

And yes, you can set priority on devices or ports in Dynamic QoS. Just Note: If you use a gigabit Internet connection (300 Mbps throughput or faster), then you don’t need to use QoS, as that wouldn't likely be bottle-necked anyways. You could also port forward to a device, if you know that device only uses those ports.

I know how that works, because I use it myself.

What I'm saying is valid, however yes it might be badly written and in need of a few corrections in that sense.

[vadim]

Teh Spoopy Kitteh님이 먼저 게시:

More cores and CPU’s in a Wifi router, the more it can handle a certain amount of devices connected to it with reasonable connectivity.

If I had a choice between two routers rated at the same speed, I would chose the one with the faster CPU. Look at how a router processes data, you’ll see why in larger deployments, it’s better to have multithreaded CPU’s in the router.

Why namely dual or quadcore while smartphones for a long time have octacore CPUs?
Answer is simple: first, number of cores has nothing to do with CPU performance. Routers have CPUs with all possible architectures from MIPS to x86. It should be clesr that the latter is faster regardless on number of cores. Second reason is simple: routers do not need to have powerful CPUs to route heavy traffic. Only cheapest and low-end routers rely on CPU to route network packets. More advanced routers use specialized hardware (probably ASICs) for what Cisco calls CEF - Cisco Express Forwarding.
This is not done in all cases, however. While best routers like Cisco or Juniper are almost always hardware-based, some semi-professional second-tier routers like MikroTik are pure software.
But this doesn't change anything - more cores doesn't mean better CPU and better CPU doesn't mean more routing bandwidth.
You can compare routers with switches. Switches do not need to have fast CPU to provide high performance switching. Often they do not have dedicated CPU at all.
Routing in general is more complicated process than switching. But only insignificant part of packets use policies that cannot be executed on hardware. These packets go through CPU.

So, you are right: if you check how router process data you will see that in most cases it doesn't use CPU at all.