Combined wireless and wired gaming

[Sabre]

Can anyone tell me what will be the impact if I run a lan party with some people connected directly to an ADSL router (with wireless LAN capability)and others connecting to the same router?? The wireless LAN can operate up to 108Mbps.

Is a wireless LAN effective for FPS games?

Cheers,

Sabre

[Chris]

I can only speak from experience and that is I had 2 players playing BF1942 online at the same time but the ping stayed the same and neither computer was affected by the other.

[rsachoc]

I did some tests, as long as there is a decent signal, wireless only adds about 3ms to the ping time.

If the signal is not that good however, I experienced some lag spikes.

Moral of the story: make sure the wireless clients have a goodish signal.

[Sabre]

Thanx Guys,

What about if we just do an off-line LAN party with 4 ppl on 100Mbps wired connection and 4 ppl on 108 Mbps? Does it make a difference having different connection speeds? Doesn't the game reduce the update frequency to the lowest connection speed?

Cheers,

Sabre

[Nickste]

Nope, not that I know of. As rsachoc said, the ppl connected via wireless might experiance a 3ms higher ping than the wired ppl, but you won't really notice any difference. Especially with only 4 people on the wireless.

Also, for the wireless to connected at 108Mbps, you need wireless cards that can also go at 108Mbps (although it won't actually achieve anything close to this).

Cheers, Nick

[rsachoc]

As Nickste said, bandwidth is'nt the factor, an 11mbits card will perform the same as a 108mbits card with regards to latency (what you need in games) as long as there is a good signal

However, good luck with data transfer at 11mbits, it is painfully slow

[Perdition]

Wireless transfer rate also drops quite dramatically (especially with G and "Super-G") as you move away from the AP, so it's even more painfully slow.