What kind of gaming router do you need?
What kind of gaming router do you need?
I have a fiber injury from hotwire and own a 10-year-old Netgear R8000P that I want to upgrade. I’m experiencing high latency issues and want to fix them. My Xbox series X is wired directly to the router. I’ve found that newer routers include QoS features to manage latency, so I think a mesh system would be best for my situation. I need something dependable. My budget is around $800, and I’m not very tech-savvy, so I want clear guidance. I’m old and appreciate extra help. Thanks in advance.
not take legal action on that. I have cat 6 connecting from the ONT to the router and cat 6 from the router to the Xbox.
When moving from the modem to the router and then to the Xbox using Cat 6 Ethernet cables, the router functions as an internet switch and should not cause latency issues. The main constraint is the router's maximum bandwidth, which the Netgear R8000P supports at 1 Gbps. If you experience high latency in games with this configuration, check the internet connection first before replacing the router.
The issue lies with the upload process. When I adjust the dynamic QOS settings to 50, the bufferbloat report improves. The speed test indicates I receive 500 Mbps from the ISP. Also, connecting the Xbox directly to the ONT still shows a low (bad) bufferbloat rating; this information might be useful.
I’ve been trying different approaches with waveform’s buffer bloat tests and it’s confusing. Sometimes the results are A, sometimes C. It might be related to ISP since I’m not testing anything else. I’m not sure how much weight I’m giving this test. Are you facing any problems with gameplay?
First there is no such thing as a "gaming" router it is all marketing.
Next forget about bufferbloat. Data is only placed into buffers when you have exceeded you internet capacity. Do you actually run you internet connection at 100% when you play games. Games only consume about 1mbps when playing. You have to be doing something very stupid like running torrent downloads while you play the game and then trying to use some silly QoS software to fix it rather than not doing stupid stuff. Stop reading garabage posted by people who sit in mom basement and play games all day rather than getting jobs learning about actual networking. All this bufferbloat stuff is from the days of DSL when you could spike your usage to 100% on a 10mbps or small connection.
Your best option is to turn off all the garbage QoS stuff. You want to basically factory reset the router and only set the wifi and admin passwords. Using any of the fancy features disables the hardware NAT and the CPU chip must now process all the data. This is also why there is no such thing as a "gaming" router. Even the very cheapest routers can pass 1gbit of traffic wan/lan using the hardware nat function. Just turning on any of these feature can actually decrease your performance.
If you are using ethernet cables to your xbox then the latency inside your house is less than 1ms. You can not do anything about the latency outside your house. Most fiber connections the latency is only about 3-5ms from your house to the ISP first office. Fundementally latency is a measure of distance based on some fraction of the speed of light though fibers. The fiber never goes the most direct path to the server and there are other thing that add time but in general the latency is not a lot above this speed of light number.
What is your actual problem. What tends to be the most important is very consistent latency. When you see spikes in the latency with a extra 50 or 100ms that causes lag in some games. The games are very smart and they factor in the time the data takes to reach you. As long as the latency is stable this works well, if the latency jumps around then this prediction of when data arrives actually causes strange issues. Just be careful of listening to gamers in moms basement thinking reducing your latency by 10ms will suddenly make you a pro player.
I'll turn off Qos to avoid strict NAT issues. With my static IP and open ports on Xbox, I'm concerned about performance. Should I check if the factory settings affected this? Would the router's processor speed and RAM impact things? Thanks for your advice.
In most cases the router cpu chip is performing very little for regular users. Wi-Fi chips handle all the wireless tasks. Functions like NAT and port forwarding are managed by dedicated hardware. Both the processor and the hardware share memory, though theoretically it could become an issue with many devices connected simultaneously. I haven’t encountered any reports of memory running out in a router.
The primary role of the router chip is to run the web browser when you access configuration menus.
I haven’t used Xbox for a while. Generally, everything functions properly in strict mode. You only notice port forwarding when your Xbox acts as a server for others—such as with Minecraft servers.
Be cautious with port forwarding lists for games. They often contain incorrect information from people who don’t understand the distinction between NAT and firewall rules. Few people actually implement real firewalls. Also, enabling a firewall on the router disables hardware NAT, which significantly reduces performance.