Wired vs. Wireless?

[D3v0ur3r]

I have 6 computers in my house. 4 on wireless & 2 on wire. I am very curious as to if anyone knows if the wireless is faster for latency issues vs the wire. Knowing that the wire would be better for sharing large files on the network. The 2 computer on wire are my sexy little game server machine & my gaming rig.

The reason I ask this is 3 of the 4 wireless computers are upstairs. 2 are for my twin boys & the other for my fiance's son. When my twins play UT04 or Q3 together 1 runs the server & plays on it while the other connects. It seems as if the one connecting has a lower ping then I would if I ran the server on my server machine & then connected to it with my gaming rig. Typically I would ping from 5 to 10 in Q3 while they are getting 3 & sometimes 0.

Of course the router & the modem are both downstairs sitting less then 5 feet away from my gaming rig & about 6 feet from my server. Large file sharing wouldn't be much of an issue. I would just like the fastest possible connection to the router.

The router is a D-Link DGL-4300. http://games.dlink.com/products/?pid=370&#DGL-4300
Both my comp & the server have gigabit ethernet but it doesn't seem to really make any difference. Links to any known tests would be great.

Edit: Same question at EB http://www.elitebastards.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14150

 

[digitalwanderer]

Oooh, I just got my D-link DI-524 revD router today....colour me interested!

 

[wireframe]

It's difficult to say why you are seeing this behavior, but typically WiFi will have higher latency and, more importantly for gaming, it may have some drop-out issues that you wouldn't normally notice with less latency sensitive applications (jitter).

I think about 6-10ms latency is typical for a WiFi connection. In this case you have two hosts connecting through WiFi so it should be additive to 12-20ms latency. With a wired connection you should have virtually zero ping on a LAN game. Of course, this depends on how the ping is measured and it may also be induced by the server or client stalling in other areas than network connectivity.

Have you tried pinging the machines using the command line? Ping from WiFi to WiFi, from WiFi to wired, from wired to WiFi, and wired to wired and see what you come up with. Note that the typical Windows/CMD 4 ping test sequence may not give you the full picture. You will probably want to append "-n X" where X is the number of pings to use to "ping <IP>". With WiFi you should expect to see more variance in the ping times than wired.