Gaming on Wireless?

[barmstrong]

Can you more often than not game on a wireless setup without problems? I bought a Netgear MR314 Wireless router and a Netgear MA101 Wireless USB adapter and would get a dropped connection every couple minutes or so playing UT. No noticable problems surfing. I used the latest firmware/drivers. When testing, I had the adapter about a foot away from the router and signal strength was 100%. Is this normal? If I try a different setup would it work better? Who makes a product? dlink? Thanks!

 

[PlatinumGold]

i game on my wireless all the time. of course it's only StarCraft Broodwars that i'm playing so mb that's why, but i've found no real difference in speed between wired vs wireless.

most games are designed to be sufferable or adequate w/ 56k so i can't imagine that any game will flood bandwidth of wireless connection w/ a decent connection. of course this also assumes that your wireless device is stationary, if your moving around than you will probably get broken connections.

 

[barmstrong]

thanks. yeah it isnt a case where bandwidth is flooded because i go wired to make sure the connection is fine then test with the wireless. just seems to drop and give me packet loss.

 

[Abzstrak]

its possible you have some interference with another WAP or a phone or a microwave oven causing the issue... try changing you default channel up or down by 5 or 6 to change the frequency.

 

[MoFunk]

Originally posted by: Abzstrak
its possible you have some interference with another WAP or a phone or a microwave oven causing the issue... try changing you default channel up or down by 5 or 6 to change the frequency.

I have the same USB nic and I have this same issue. Seems to be my cordless phone or my baby monitor. I have been a few rounds with Netgear and nothing works. I am going to test this by unplugging my phone and baby monitor sometime.

 

[barmstrong]

I tried every channel and none of them changed. I get really bad packet loss in games after about 2 minutes. I've tried the USB Nic with the Netgear MR314 and the Linksys WAP11 and both had the same problems. Signal strength hovered around 90-95%. I wonder if there is a problem with the drivers? Guess I'll try the Linksys USB NIC next.

I doubt anyone else around my house has another WAP but probably a lot of wireless phones.

 

[Nighthawk69]

Never had any problems gaming via 802.11b. In fact, I do it all the time, whether it be on the LAN with other wireless and/or wired computers or with many wired and wireless computers playing out to the Internet. No problems. Games do not take a lot of bandwidth to play, so getting a bunch of wireless clients on my router is no big deal.

Gear:
Orinoco 802.11b cards (PCMCIA and USB) on all of my machines, various cards when others are here playing.
Previous router was an SMC Barricade 7004AWBR, worked great.
Now I have a Siemens SpeedStream with a more powerful antenna and no problem either.

Good luck!

 

[Nighthawk69]

Also note, I'm told 2.4Ghz telephones can cause some bad stuff with 802.11b as they are both 2.4Ghz devices. I don't have any 2.4Ghz phones, so I can't comment from experience.

 

[gmbrker]

I have a linksys usb wireless adapter and what I notice is that whenever CPU usage spikes up to 80-100% I would lose conn, when usage drops back down, connection would be re-established. Most games such as MMORPG take 90-100 cpu usage so I would get really bad lag every 5-10 secs cause of the connection dropping and reconnnecting. Try downloading something and spike cpu usage and see if your connection stays up. This was on an AMD Duron 950mhz with 512 megs ram.

 

[PCMarine]

I always recommend going with a card-based network adapter, wether it's wired or wireless, USB is just too unreliable and sucks CPU cycles

 

[barmstrong]

thanks everyone. i tried a linksys wireless pc card on my laptop and it worked perfectly so im wondering if it is the fact that its a USB adapter or if the netgear is just crappy. I guess ill try a PCI card and see what happens. anyone have a recommendation for a pci card?