[SOLVED] Using 3rd party firmware question

[voyboy488]

This question is for those who are experienced with 3rd party firmware and flashing their routers.

Apologies in advance because I am a newbie but I was curious about using 3rd party firmware for a netgear nighthawk R7800 for online gaming ONLY.

If I was only gaming, is their any benefit to flash my firmware for improvement to overall latency/ping spikes in games comparing manufacture firmware vs 3rd party firmware for R7800?

I am not really sure what a 3rd party firmware does other than I can use SQM which is supposidly better than QOS.

I know their is shaping from 3rd party firmware as well where you can set download and upload limits but I can do that with R7800 just as easy.

I am mainly focusing on OpenWRT but open to the other firmwares as well.

With that in mind, any benefits to flashing R7800 firmware for pure gaming only or is the stock firmware from netgear good enough?

I feel like that had R7800 not supported QOS or shaping to make bufferbloat better then I woulda for sure flashed firmware but I feel like their is no need since those features are found on R7800.

 

[Math Geek]

the purpose of QOS is to shape the traffic so one type gets priority over another. if the only traffic is gaming traffic, then there is no other traffic to prioritize it over.

so you really won't see the benefit of traffic shaping if there is only one kind of traffic. there is no harm in doing it if you just want to see what it looks like, but real world there won't be much benefit with a single use case like you have.

 

[vov4ik_il]

I did port a couple of devices to OpenWrt myself. It is pretty stable. The right question is - do I have issues that I want solved with it? In my case, the answer was “yes”.
P.S The latency and jitter are mainly upstream from your router, the only good thing you can do to earn a handful of ms on your end is exclude the wifi part and wire your pc to the router.

 

[voyboy488]

I did port a couple of devices to OpenWrt myself. It is pretty stable. The right question is - do I have issues that I want solved with it? In my case, the answer was “yes”.
P.S The latency and jitter are mainly upstream from your router, the only good thing you can do to earn a handful of ms on your end is exclude the wifi part and wire your pc to the router.

Thank you for reply! It sounds like I have nothing to lose to try out the 3rd party firmware, ofc gotta make sure I don't brick my whole device.

In general and from your personal experience what are the most common features people are looking for when they use a 3rd party firmware? I heard about adblock stuff, OpenVPN stuff, bridging and some other stuff but I don't think I use that stuff or just not too familiar with it. But the big ones for me def have to be SQM and shaping.

Btw for SQM is it like a toggle on and off thing or do I have to specify what devices/programs to perform SQM on? (Sorry if noob question!)

 

[bill001g]

Your first step is to look at your utilization. If you are not using 100% of the bandwidth any form of QoS will at best do nothing and in some cases can make things worse.

The next consideration is if you have a very fast internet connection loading third party firmware will cap the speeds. There are hardware features in many routers that they do not release the drivers for that allow traffic to bypass the cpu. Forcing traffic thought the CPU will cap you at 200-250mbps. Note even on factory image that has this bypass feature if you attempt to use any feature that needs to examine the traffic this feature must be disabled. Pretty much if you have a fast internet connection and want to do more than simple NAT you have to use a PC to do it.

 

[vov4ik_il]

In general and from your personal experience what are the most common features people are looking for when they use a 3rd party firmware? I heard about adblock stuff, OpenVPN stuff, bridging and some other stuff but I don't think I use that stuff or just not too familiar with it. But the big ones for me def have to be SQM and shaping.

Btw for SQM is it like a toggle on and off thing or do I have to specify what devices/programs to perform SQM on? (Sorry if noob question!)

In my case it was repurposing cloud-managed wireless access points to be standalone.
Other things I use it for are kids-friendly internet with up-time schedule and content filtering.
It is popular for VPN too but I have a separate firewall device running pfsense for traffic access/management and all that.

Traffic shapers and limiters are fairly simple to configure in OpenWRT, but not to on/off extent.

 

[voyboy488]

Your first step is to look at your utilization. If you are not using 100% of the bandwidth any form of QoS will at best do nothing and in some cases can make things worse.

The next consideration is if you have a very fast internet connection loading third party firmware will cap the speeds. There are hardware features in many routers that they do not release the drivers for that allow traffic to bypass the cpu. Forcing traffic thought the CPU will cap you at 200-250mbps. Note even on factory image that has this bypass feature if you attempt to use any feature that needs to examine the traffic this feature must be disabled. Pretty much if you have a fast internet connection and want to do more than simple NAT you have to use a PC to do it.

Yeah this my issue I get 800 mbps dl and 3rd party firmware such as OpenWRT will not go past 250-300... That's the only thing stopping me tbh

 

[vov4ik_il]

3rd party firmware such as OpenWRT will not go past 250-300...

That's not true. It really depends on the hardware and options used.

Edit: looked for it on the OpenWRT bb, people do get 850MBps with proper settings.

 

[punkncat]

I have used WRT in the past because it offered features the stock firmware did not offer, and that I needed at a time that infrastructure wouldn't allow a different product. Aside from the feature, I saw no other advantage.

 

[kanewolf]

Yeah this my issue I get 800 mbps dl and 3rd party firmware such as OpenWRT will not go past 250-300... That's the only thing stopping me tbh

800Mbit downlink is not a problem for any home use. You COULD use all your uplink bandwidth. That is what you need to look at.