Question Best advanced network adapter settings for gaming ?

[jnxzi94]

Hi!

I've read online that disabling nearly every feature is good and setting the highest value possible for transmit buffers and receive buffers being the double of transmit buffers. Is this true?
I'm looking to improve packet loss, latency and the overall performance of my network adapter for gaming.

 

[bill001g]

In general you want to leave all the setting on default.

A online game only uses a tiny amount of traffic compared to the interface on your machine. It might use 1mbit/s and most machine have 1gbit.

Increasing buffers might actually hurt game performance you never want data buffered since it causes delays. But even if it did the delays are so tiny, well less than a fraction of 1ms, that you would never see them. Data is only placed in a buffer if you have exceeded the capacity of the port which should never happen. Someone downloading large files in the background while trying to get maximum game performance is just being stupid. It is even more stupid to try to fix this by adjusting setting on the machine rather than just not download at the same time.

Most the large delays and problem with network are outside your house where you can't do anything about them. Almost all local problems are with some other software running on the machine or with the game itself.

 

[jnxzi94]

In general you want to leave all the setting on default.

A online game only uses a tiny amount of traffic compared to the interface on your machine. It might use 1mbit/s and most machine have 1gbit.

Increasing buffers might actually hurt game performance you never want data buffered since it causes delays. But even if it did the delays are so tiny, well less than a fraction of 1ms, that you would never see them. Data is only placed in a buffer if you have exceeded the capacity of the port which should never happen. Someone downloading large files in the background while trying to get maximum game performance is just being stupid. It is even more stupid to try to fix this by adjusting setting on the machine rather than just not download at the same time.

Most the large delays and problem with network are outside your house where you can't do anything about them. Almost all local problems are with some other software running on the machine or with the game itself.

But then again... I've read many posts online about "the best settings" and I think the network adapter default settings are a bit off, can this be? I see that the transmit & receive buffers are the same amount on default so does it matter because I read that the other one should be double of the other one.

Basically, what I did now is shown below. Do you think this is bad? I did a bit of optimizing because I think the default settings didn't make any sense after all. I only listed the settings I focused on, as I said, power saving features are also disabled. I tested out, didn't have packet bursts and gaming felt ok.

Large Send Offload / Large Receive Offload >> OFF
Flow Control >> OFF
Interrupt Moderation >> OFF
ARP / NS Offload >> OFF
Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) >> OFF
Speed & Duplex >> THE MAXIMUM VALUE
IPv4 TCP/UDP Checksum Offload >> ON
IPv6 TCP/UDP Checksum Offload >> ON
Transmit Buffers >> 1024
Receive Buffers >> 512
Receive Side Scaling (RSS) >> ON (WITH QUEUE VALUE OF 4)

I have downloaded the latest Realtek LAN driver from Realtek's website, which has a little bit different settings and values than the one that comes from my motherboard's support website, which one would be better to use?

 

[bill001g]

A huge problem with a lot of stuff people "read" on the internet is it is just garbage unqualified people cut and paste from other sources.
This is huge issue on so called "gamer" sites. There are a huge number of literal children who live at home with their parents and have never worked a day in technical field or had any formal training. They depend on google for their information, they really are no better than chatgpt. Key is none of them can explain their recommendation they don't actually know what the words mean.

Again in the very best situation you would run with no buffers at all. It takes a small amount of time to place data into buffers. The problem is the cpu might be busy at the very instance data is received so you need to hold the data. I would trust the experts that wrote the drivers to pick the optimum value over "some guy" on the internet.

You want the speed/duplex always set to auto. When it is set to auto it send signals to the other end to negotiate the highest speed. Your router always runs auto and generally can not be changed. If you set your pc to something other than auto it does not send these negotiation signals and the router may not select the same speed. The only way to use the other options is if you can manually match them on the router which consumer routers do not support.

There really is nothing you can set in your nic that will matter to gaming. The traffic rates are much to low to matter and when you are talking about the time the cpu takes to put things in buffers you are talking like .00001ms.
Does it really matter if a game packet take 100.00001ms or 100ms.
You run the risk of messing things up.

The only real time it pays to change network adapter setting is if you were running 10gbit interfaces to local servers in your house. In these cases the speed and amount of data transferred makes a difference.

 

[kira-faye]

Just don't touch them. The defaults are far and away the best option for 99.99% of situations, hence why they're the defaults. Who do you trust more, someone who wrote the software with years of experience and advanced schooling, or a literal child on Reddit?

Are you actually having an issue with latency and packet loss? Barring a hardware failure or badly behaving driver, that usually requires talking to your ISP and getting them to track down system issues on their end. Not easy, but you can't fix problems you aren't the cause of.

 

[jnxzi94]

Just don't touch them. The defaults are far and away the best option for 99.99% of situations, hence why they're the defaults. Who do you trust more, someone who wrote the software with years of experience and advanced schooling, or a literal child on Reddit?

Are you actually having an issue with latency and packet loss? Barring a hardware failure or badly behaving driver, that usually requires talking to your ISP and getting them to track down system issues on their end. Not easy, but you can't fix problems you aren't the cause of.

I've had some issues every now and then but because I'm a very competitive player so I'm also a freak about minimizing all the possible latency and like pushing out the max. performance out of everything.

But I took some of your advice. I left most of the settings back to default but I disabled NS & ARP offload and all the oher power saving features which are just not important and/or not needed. I have set the Speed & Duplex back to AUTO.

I have to confirm if I remember correctly, the transmit buffer value was set to 128 as default, and it did not work well, it was causing a lot frequent packet loss than my customized settings so I guess there is also some things that just don't work as it was meant to.

 

[bill001g]

The defaults are generally 256 receive 512 transmit. Not all adapters have the option to reset it to the recommended defaults.
"Competitive" gamers need to spend time practicing their game rather than thinking there is some magic pay to win setting or fancy hardware they can buy.

So many gamers do not want to spend the time actually learning how networking really works and how game engines communicate. They would have to go to a actual job rather than sitting in moms basement and posting mis information to forums thinking they are expert technicians as well as god gamers.

Games are designed to not favor someone who has a lower latency or more bandwidth. Now if the difference is huge say a couple 100ms difference between players that the game can not really fix. Pretty much anything under 100ms is fine and why you should always play on servers in your country. There are special servers that have more aggressive setting when they are used is say a lan situation rather than over the internet.

So messing around with stuff to save 1ms will make no difference. The game will just add some extra artificial delays to make you the same as all the other players.

 

[jnxzi94]

The defaults are generally 256 receive 512 transmit. Not all adapters have the option to reset it to the recommended defaults.
"Competitive" gamers need to spend time practicing their game rather than thinking there is some magic pay to win setting or fancy hardware they can buy.

So many gamers do not want to spend the time actually learning how networking really works and how game engines communicate. They would have to go to a actual job rather than sitting in moms basement and posting mis information to forums thinking they are expert technicians as well as god gamers.

Games are designed to not favor someone who has a lower latency or more bandwidth. Now if the difference is huge say a couple 100ms difference between players that the game can not really fix. Pretty much anything under 100ms is fine and why you should always play on servers in your country. There are special servers that have more aggressive setting when they are used is say a lan situation rather than over the internet.

So messing around with stuff to save 1ms will make no difference. The game will just add some extra artificial delays to make you the same as all the other players.

You are wrong if you think that players are not seeking ways to improve their gaming comfort and competitive advantage. I already responded to the other part, but the rest of the text is not relevant to me.

I've been using computers since 1999 but I never been into networking which made me think of asking this.

And surely I can confirm that my default value was 128.