Does Asus Gaming QoS Prioritize Packets? Or only bandwidth?

[Rudabegga]

I've been digging through the googles, but haven't found anything concrete. I'm curious if anyone knows if the Asus gaming QoS is still just prioritizing bandwidth? Or does it prioritize packets? Typically for gaming, you would be less concerned about bandwidth I would assume. As long as it's prioritizing that packets always go to your gaming device and are prioritized, that would theoretically result in less lag, especially with other devices running.

I've been trying to help a client of mine narrow down major latency spikes in Rocket League. I've run numerous ping tests through the router, and can't replicate anything significant that would equate to the 400-500ms pings he's claiming to be getting. When pinging to basically anything, I can't replicate any sort of major spikes or jitter. If I can't replicate jitter or packet loss to anything else, it seems weird to me that it would be happening in online games. So I'm just curious what other's experiences have been when enabling the gaming QoS. I just enabled it today, so I'll update my post if I find out it made any improvements to his connectivity.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Adooni]

long time ago Asus was working with this https://www.wtfast.com/en/routers/

 

[Tech9]

I'm curious

Asus uses 3rd party TrendMicro engine for Adaptive QoS with packets prioritization, but it doesn't work well for all types of traffic and for all users. Two attempts were made to fix it with custom scripts allowing more customization per specific needs. No idea how this thing works on top of Broadcom's NAT acceleration black box. Both developers abandoned the project at some point. Too many unknowns in the equation (closed source) and newer firmware versions started breaking things. Use what's available, test what works and good luck. For WAN connections >350Mbps Adaptive QoS is the only option, good or bad. Bandwidth Limiter, Traditional QoS and Cake QoS (in Asuswrt-Merlin) are all NAT acceleration incompatible.

 

[drinkingbird]

I've been digging through the googles, but haven't found anything concrete. I'm curious if anyone knows if the Asus gaming QoS is still just prioritizing bandwidth? Or does it prioritize packets? Typically for gaming, you would be less concerned about bandwidth I would assume. As long as it's prioritizing that packets always go to your gaming device and are prioritized, that would theoretically result in less lag, especially with other devices running.

I've been trying to help a client of mine narrow down major latency spikes in Rocket League. I've run numerous ping tests through the router, and can't replicate anything significant that would equate to the 400-500ms pings he's claiming to be getting. When pinging to basically anything, I can't replicate any sort of major spikes or jitter. If I can't replicate jitter or packet loss to anything else, it seems weird to me that it would be happening in online games. So I'm just curious what other's experiences have been when enabling the gaming QoS. I just enabled it today, so I'll update my post if I find out it made any improvements to his connectivity.

Thanks in advance!

The thing to keep in mind is QOS is of very limited value when you only control one end. So you can prioritize packets going outbound, but only as far as the next hop (ISP). Inbound not much you can do. Prioritizing within your LAN is feasible but I don't believe Asus QOS does anything with that, you'd need a switch with QOS features.

QOS can do more harm than good too, all it is doing is putting pseudo limitations on the connection, making some devices think there is saturation and others think it is all good. This really only works for TCP traffic, UDP not so much.

The QOS process also adds a bit of latency to process the packets.

It sounds like the latency he's seeing is out in the ISP or internet. If you can find the IP of the game server he's connecting to (watch the active connections when he fires it up) then try some testing to that. However the latency reported by games is not just network latency, it is total latency including processing on the game server etc. In some cases it even includes the connection to another player in that stat.

If the latency is beyond his router, QOS will do more harm than good (even if it isn't, that's usually the case, it is only needed if you are saturating the connection with other things, like running a large file upload while gaming. If the link is not saturated, QOS will only hurt, not help). It isn't like it is going to accelerate packets beyond the speed of light or anything.

When doing your ping tests make sure you're trying a range of packet sizes. Maybe his MTU is too high causing fragmentation/packet loss which results in higher latency. If they are using PPPoE for connection method, make sure WAN MTU is 1492. Other ISPs also have values lower than the default 1500 so something to consider.