Online gaming is one of those activities that is highly sensitive to network performance. In online gaming, several factors play an important role, including download speed, latency, ping spikes, packet loss, and connection stability. A household can have a fast internet connection but still have a poor online gaming experience, especially when several devices are competing for the bandwidth.
To improve the online gaming experience, gaming routers are available in the market, which intelligently manage network traffic. Rather than simply making an internet connection faster, they can identify important traffic on the network and prioritise it, control bandwidth usage, and reduce network congestion. Let us take a look at how gaming routers prioritise real-time gaming traffic and improve the online gaming experience.
Gaming Routers Focus on Latency
Online gaming involves continuous exchange of relatively small amounts of data between the player device and game server. In online gaming, how quickly data packets travel between the player and server matters more than the bandwidth. This is measured in terms of latency, or ping, and represents the time it takes for data packets to travel between the device and the server.
A sudden increase in latency can lead to delayed actions, rubber-banding, or characters appearing to move unpredictably. Gaming routers take care of this and focus on maintaining consistent latency, even during periods of network congestion, so that the gameplay experience is as smooth as possible.
Quality of Service (QoS) Prioritises Important Traffic
In gaming routers, you can access a feature called Quality of Service or QoS through 192.168.1.254. It is one of the most important features for online gamers, as it decides how network resources are allocated when multiple types of traffic compete for bandwidth.
For instance, if you are playing an online game and someone in your household starts downloading a large file. The QoS feature gives gaming traffic higher priority on the network and ensures smooth gameplay. Without QoS, the download may consume much of the available bandwidth and cause queues to build up. The QoS feature ensures that latency-sensitive traffic gets processed promptly.
Device-Based Prioritisation
Along with traffic-based prioritisation, some gaming routers have a device-based prioritisation feature that allows users to prioritise a specific device on the network. This feature, like most other features, is accessible through the 192.168.0.1 web interface, and you just need to identify your gaming device and assign it high priority.
So when network congestion occurs, the router can give traffic from that device high priority over other devices. This feature is more useful than the QoS feature, as identifying the gaming device is often simpler and more reliable than attempting to identify every individual game.
Bandwidth Allocation
Gaming routers also have bandwidth allocation features that prevent one device from taking up the entire network. Bandwidth allocation works alongside prioritization and ensures a smooth gaming experience by allocating a specific amount of bandwidth for each device.
For instance, a household has a 100 Mbps internet connection. One device begins downloading a large file. Without bandwidth allocation, it will try to use nearly the entire bandwidth, while other devices may have to wait. However, with bandwidth allocation, you can limit the maximum bandwidth available to each device or application so that no single device or application can consume the entire bandwidth.
While gaming routers improve online gaming experience, it is important not to expect too much from a gaming router, as online gaming experience also depends on the quality of your internet connection, internet service provider router, distance to the game server, packet loss, ISP network problems, and game-server performance.
A gaming router is most useful when the problem originates within the local network instead of other factors mentioned above.
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