Question Wi-Fi 6, 6E, or 7 for PC gaming?

[MasterYoda327]

I plan to replace my gaming PC by either the end of this year or early next year, dependent on when the Nvidia RTX 50 and Radeon RX 8000 GPU are released. However, I am considering the possibility of replacing my Netgear Orbi RBK852 Wi-Fi6 mesh system either during Black Friday or Cyber Monday this year. I see that the prices for some Wi-Fi7 mesh systems are falling. Please note that due to the different locations of my PC and modem, I cannot do a direct ethernet cable connection between both devices. Now, I more often play single-player games than multiplayer games, but I would like a good Internet connection for online gaming for games like Star Wars the Old Republic or Call of Duty and Battlefield. My budget is around $500 for the Wi-Fi setup. Depending on your suggestions, if you say I am better off sticking with my existing mesh system, I may purchase an additional Netgear satellite and place it in my PC's location to try to get a stronger signal. I would also appreciate your advice and suggestions on possible alternative Wi-Fi mesh models. So would I be better off with Wi-Fi 6, 6E, or 7 for PC gaming?

Thanks in advance.

 

[USAFRet]

Ideally, NO WiFi.

Hardwired if in any way possible. Yes, I understand "different locations". But still....

 

[bill001g]

All wifi is bad and in some ways the newer wifi is worse depending how you look at it. The data is encoded much more densely using a more complex method. This means the data is more sensitive to damage.

They key thing with online games is they use almost no bandwidth. Most are under 1mbps. This means they would work even on the slowest wifi.

The problem is unlike almost any other kind of network wifi does error recovery for damaged data. So if a packet gets damaged it is retransmitted by the wifi. This takes small amounts of time which causes random variation in the packets.

Online games unlike almost any other kinda of data use the timing between packets to sync the client to the server. Variations in the timing messes up the prediction software so you get lag spikes.

Pretty much wifi and online games are the worst network combination.

I would still avoid wifi7 it is still too new and some of the features are not in all devices yet. Not that I see the need to use all 3 radios at the same time and bond them as being popular. It is going to greatly increase the cost of the nic cards because unlike routers a nic tends to only have 1 radio chip.

Pretty much you buy wifi6e mostly to get support of the 6ghz radio band or you stick with wifi5 (802.11ac). Wifi6 was not much better than wifi5 because of all the issue with the 160mhz radio band and rules related to stuff like weather radar avoidance.

Just be aware the only difference is going to be the install speed of your games.

I would look for some kind of wired solution. MoCA or powerline networks tend to be better for playing online games than any kind of wifi.

 

[USAFRet]

I plan to replace my gaming PC by either the end of this year or early next year, dependent on when the Nvidia RTX 50 and Radeon RX 8000 GPU are released. However, I am considering the possibility of replacing my Netgear Orbi RBK852 Wi-Fi6 mesh system either during Black Friday or Cyber Monday this year. I see that the prices for some Wi-Fi7 mesh systems are falling. Please note that due to the different locations of my PC and modem, I cannot do a direct ethernet cable connection between both devices. Now, I more often play single-player games than multiplayer games, but I would like a good Internet connection for online gaming for games like Star Wars the Old Republic or Call of Duty and Battlefield. My budget is around $500 for the Wi-Fi setup. Depending on your suggestions, if you say I am better off sticking with my existing mesh system, I may purchase an additional Netgear satellite and place it in my PC's location to try to get a stronger signal. I would also appreciate your advice and suggestions on possible alternative Wi-Fi mesh models. So would I be better off with Wi-Fi 6, 6E, or 7 for PC gaming?

Thanks in advance.

Is there any problem with your current WiFi situation?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

[BFG-9000]

For games, bandwidth doesn't matter and latency is everything.

In every generation of Wifi they always seem to promise reduced latency with some killer feature but it never works, and they only end up with more gaudy bandwidth numbers for the marketing people. With Wifi 5 it was MU-MIMO beamforming, and with Wifi 6 it was OFDMA (further testing here and here).

Well now with Wifi 7 they promise Multi-Link Operation (a feature that increases capacity by simultaneously using different frequency bands and channels, ie bonding 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz at the same time) could theoretically reduce latency by 99% because if one band is busy, well it just sends things over another. Do you believe them? After all OFDMA also promised some subcarrier would get through and beamforming that one path would. The problem is, the only way to tell a packet didn't get through is the checksum shows it got corrupted, so, as Bill mentioned, a request for it to be retransmitted has to be sent and that all takes time. These features could actually work if there was a way to tell what wouldn't work before sending.

The only thing that seems to work remarkably well is the old Make-Wifi-Fast project that applied AQM to wifi to minimize buffering. It was so effective that it was included into the mainline Linux kernel and OpenWRT--but sadly requires open-enough drivers to allow tinkering with the network stack, so only works with the QCA ath9k (N), ath10k (AC), or MediaTek MT76 (AC) drivers it was developed on. So if you want really low-latency Wifi, you'll have to settle for Wifi 4 or Wifi 5.