I just got the WRT54GS router, a version 2 indicated by the serial number. With the intention of using it as a base to establish some QoS for my online gaming over a cable modem. There are two workstations using this cable modem to play the same games, very often at the same time. I have experienced enough negative issues involving the responsiveness of the games to feel that QoS is what I need to get past most of them.
I just found this site http://gamer.ubicom.com/index.html which goes into the technology behind the D-Link gaming router. Here is a link to the appropriate document: http://gamer.ubicom.com/guides/qos_tech … guide.html
It sounds very solid, and it sounds like it would be able to actually do what I would try and do manually with this router and the QoS and traffic shaping that the OpenWRT firmware will give me access to.
Has anyone had the oppurtunity to compare these two to see if there is any benefit to having full access and control to the QoS rules that OpenWRT would allow? Or does this D-Link gaming router with the StreamEngine algorithm do it all without the need to hand write/tune and tweak the rules that the OpenWRT method would require?
It sounds like the most important concern in regards to gaming performance over a cable modem is just making sure that the outgoing packets do not ever get stuck in the cache on the cable modem. From what I understand this is mostly achieved by limiting the rate of outgoing packets from the router to the effective uplink speed of the cable modem.
The catch is that apparently this is an ever changing value and if uplink transfer rate to any given server your game happens to be using ever goes below your preset upper limit in the router you will still get packet caching on the modem. Are there QoS techinques available through what can be achieved with OpenWRT that will detect this and be able to adapt the routers uplink limiter? Or in practice does this rarely, if ever, happen and they are just trying to sell gaming routers 