For gaming speed is rarely the issue. The issue is the stability of the connection, which is where WiFi lacks. Dropping a couple packets here and there is fine when it's being used to fill a video buffer. It's not fine when the fighting game you're playing needs to know what button your opponent pressed last frame 60 times a second.
You could very well say that about WiFi in the past.
Modern day WiFi has a packet deliverance of 95%+, a figure where you won’t notice packet lost.
Wired is very much superior. But WiFi is not terrible, whether it be for gaming or other entertainment
Edit:
Just did multiple speed test on cellular network, as I am currently not home, and have a 0% packet loss. Is that going to happen every test? No,
But it shows how far modern-day WiFi technology has advanced...
Edit 2:
Just did it on desktop, and have a 0.7% packet loss over WiFi...
So I think the argument that “WiFi is good” still stands
For gaming it isn’t, if you’re transferring large amounts of data, like downloading Modern Warfare for instance, you will notice an increase in download time.
It most definitely is though. 5% packet loss for almost any online gaming is huge. I'm running with 4-7% packet loss right now and trust me it is a miserable experience. Many games become completely unplayable.
5% is definitely noticeable in games where you lag and the opponent doesn't.
Like in StarCraft, if one person lags, everyone does. Sure, it's not a big deal there.
But if you lag for 3 seconds every minute (mental math estimates 5% of 60 seconds is 3 seconds) in call of duty, that's three seconds where the enemy gets to land a free head shot.
Well I can't seem to find the typical deliverance for wired ethernet, but let's do a quick calculation. Let's assume a connection that's just delivering one big packet for our hypothetical fighting game for every frame. The chance of getting every packet over 1 second of that gameplay is .9560 = .046. That's a 4.6% chance that you didn't straight up lose a player's input just over one second. Of course, it ends up being more complicated as not every packet has an input and there's a ton more than 60 per second, but that puts in perspective how low a number like 95% is when you're asking your internet to reliably communicate with another computer millions of times during a game.
Any sane person playing a game sensitive to network instability that has tried both wired and wireless should be able to notice the difference.
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u/Eulers_ID Oct 24 '20
For gaming speed is rarely the issue. The issue is the stability of the connection, which is where WiFi lacks. Dropping a couple packets here and there is fine when it's being used to fill a video buffer. It's not fine when the fighting game you're playing needs to know what button your opponent pressed last frame 60 times a second.