Using 3rd party firmware question

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.

I’m biased, but I would recommend 10/10 openwrt is better than anything from oem when it comes to security updates, customization, and buffer bloat.

That said, for raw speeds (300mb +) , oem firmware still have a few advantages due to some chips not having open source drivers available (or fully mature).

But on the whole, I would recommend you to try it out and see if it suits your needs. The r7800 can be fairly easily rolled back to oem firmware if you change your mind.

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!)

Basically yes. Install the sqm and luci-sqm packages, then turn them on and configure with the “piece of cake” profile. Set your bandwidth for up/down and click apply.

More details are here

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/traffic-shaping/sqm

@OP - How fast is your connection (down/up)? On my R7800, piece of cake is CPU limited to about 160 M down (my connection is 225/12). If you are also CPU-bound, you may get faster results with fq_codel and simplest_tbf.

Got 800 mbps down and 40 up.

Heard that I won't be able to go past 250-300 with OpenWRT so this the only thing stopping me.

You might not need SQM depending on your ISP actually. Run the dslreports bufferbloat test.