Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

My experience with GeForce Now is that despite having fiber internet and WiFi 6, games are still unplayably laggy. I also wasn't able to play Cities Skylines, because none of my Steam Workshop mods would install.

View on HN

It's better if you have Ethernet, that way I get no stutter and the lag is almost unnoticeable (I get 9ms ping which is lower than the duration between 2 monitor refreshes at 60Hz)

More anacedata: GeForce now over Ethernet is significantly better than Wi-Fi 6 in my apartment building.

My only question is how this is even surprising.

Wi-Fi is an arms race between you and your neighbours about who has the most powerful Wi-Fi transmitter, while Ethernet works wonderfully and collision free, in terms of network packets.

We all have at least three Wi-Fi devices, including the smartphone, using some frequency bandwidth.

Yes, people dislike cables, but if you ever play and transmit the game via OBS to Twitch, for example, Wi-Fi is simply not going to cut it any more.

In principle Wi-Fi devices should be able to find a free frequency channel to communicate in (especially Wi-Fi 6 that parent refers to), so yes, this is surprising. Maybe there is a reason GeForce Now has a page about recommended Wi-Fi routers:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/geforce-now/recommended/

These huge, powerful routers are exactly what you don't want your neighbours to have in an apartment building. =)

Wi-Fi power is limited by country, so a cheap router will have the same power as an expensive one. The expensive ones can direct it better, so I think you want your neighbor to have one so the power is used for their devices and not yours.

It's gotta be the wifi, you're probably dropping packets here and there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com