ScrimZ - Wifi Lan

Over the past 6 years or so I have been hearing people debate about gaming on a WiFi connection. Some say it is good and some say that only a noob would game over WiFi. I myself have been one of those people that think I am way better than I am, and a professional gamer like me would not be caught dead on a wireless line. This topic came back up recently and I decided to do a quick comparison.

I went out and got a Linksys internal wireless card. The same computer was used for this test at the same time of day to have a good comparison base. Here are the spec on the system used for this test.

I wanted to see how much faster LAN was so I tested the general game play and frames per second (FPS) in three online games as shown here

As you can see the FPS did not change all that much. I thought it was a bit weird that wifi had a better rating, in any game, so I also did two other series of tests. The difference either way was never more than 18. It really did not seem to make a difference. The game play was also the same. My kill to death ratio was no different and in game I could not tell between the two connections.

On the other side of things the loading time was noticeably longer when loading the maps. It took me more time to enter and exit servers. This did not bother me to much since the game play was fine. Seemed like a small price to pay.

In the second test I wanted to check the file transfer times. I took a random install I had on that computer and zipped up the file. The file size ended up being 5.01MB. I tested the upload and download time going from our web server to my PC.

See results

As you can see this is where the major difference was. The download speed dropped quite a bit. If I did anything that used a network resource I felt the lag. Doing any type of data transferring, regardless if it is over the network or the internet, you seem to get a bit older by the time the transfer completed.

To summarize this whole thing I will put this in two categories, for kids and for work. If your kid wants to have a computer to game on and you do not want wires everywhere, wireless is fine as long as you have a strong connection. This of course would not be ideal for a professional gamer. If you are in a work place and have network drives and websites to update, wireless is not what you need, well unless you charge by the hourJ. All of our files are stored on network drives here at ScrimZ. While making this article I said “Why is my system so slow right now” and then I realized I was still on the wireless connection. Do not get me wrong, you can still get your work done and enjoy gaming on a wireless connection but most of us are not known for our patients.

By:
Anthony C.