What does “Multimedia/Gaming Environment” setting do for some Wifi adapters?

[sam1275tom]

Hello.
On Windows, when using some Wifi adapters, in device properties > advanced tab, you'll see a setting called "Multimedia/Gaming Environment", it is disabled by default and you can enable it if you like.
I tested it myself and found enabling this will sometimes result in a slightly lower link-layer speed, but also slightly less packet loss.
Googling it will show up a lot of different explain for it, some says it's QOS, some says it lower the buffer, some says it's a frame burst technology, some says it allow more connections, some says it lower the ping, some says it trys to maintain a constant ping.....
So what does this setting actually do, officially?
Thanks.

 

[mrmez]

It's not an official standard so there's no official definition. Different companies probably do different things.
One point tho, whatever setting there should be ZERO packet loss. Anything other than zero is a problem, and you should probably look at your router settings and network environment.

 

[HEXiT]

adjusts the priority of that device on the network... at least thats the idea. in reality it barely makes any difference.
basically if you have 3 or more devices connecting to the router the 1 running the mm/gaming env will get a higher priority over the other devices even if its lower in the connection order.
but your router/modem has to support the feature.

 

[bill001g]

Likely a lot of nothing.

No matter what you set on your machine you can not affect the traffic being send by another machine. If you could everyone would set their traffic to be better than their neighbors.

It can only affect traffic being sent from your machine. What this means is if you are uploading a bunch of data say with torrents it will give priority to your game data. BUT if you really want good game performance why would you be stupid enough to run other stuff on your machine that will degrade the network performance in the first place. Wouldn't it be simpler to not do stupid stuff and then hope some magic feature fixes you being stupid.

In most cases it is marketing gimmick so they can slap "gaming" on the box to fool people into thinking that make it better