it wouldnt do much of anything at all if youre trying to play WoW on more than one computer at a time...
Thats not exactly true. See the problem is when your playing a multiplayer game, the game talks to the server (and visa versa) through certian ports. Theres two parts of this; the IP the traffic is going to and from, and the port the traffic is going through on both incoming and outgoing connections. When your connected to a modem, the IP address the traffic is coming from (your computer) is the same IP address the traffic is going to. Also, the ports are opened by the game itself. When your connected to your router, it uses Network Address Translation(NAT) to link the outgoing traffic from your PC to the return traffic the server sends backs. I could go a ton into how NAT works, and how it plays a roll in gaming, but thats beyond the scope of this post. Lets just think of it as technology that is needed in the router to properly route the traffic back to the right place that it started.
But NAT doesnt't always work. Your setting rules to inform traffic inside your network how to get where it needs to go to make a certian game work. So if a TCP packet is sent out from your PC, makes it to the WoW server, and is then sent back, and it makes it to your router, it may not know how to get to the computer that sent it. Thats where the "Gaming" section comes in. Your telling the router that when packets of this type are looking for this port, please direct them to this computer. If two PC are trying to use the same port, but two to different locations, then port forwarding doesn't work. It would be like having two people in your house, and they both want to forward the house phone to their cell phones. You call the number, and the phone company doesn't know where to send it. Thats where port triggers come in and using the Private Server function, but thats for more P2P (Bittorrent, etc) and not multiplayer games. And if packets don't know where to go, they go to the wrong place, or they get dropped by the router. Which means they have to be resent. That means latency. Where the big problem comes from is if either side determines the connection to be unstable, it will dump it. I have seen this sometimes cause routers to reboot. Other times it just disconnects you from the game server. Best case is it just creates a huge latency spike while the two connections handshake again.
Now there is a second part of this. The Gaming part just handles where(IP) the data is going, and how(Port) to get there. It doesn't control the priority(QoS) it gives that process. Gamefuel is a intelligence QoS that prioritized traffic based on ports. It knows that certain ports are used for certain data that is time sensitive (movies, VOIP, gaming, etc) so gives that traffic a higher priority. A Gamefuel rule is a way of setting specific rules to over-ride Gamefuel much like a Gaming rule override NAT. So you can say when traffic is coming in on this port to this IP, give it priority over the average stuff. It mostly focuses on the outgoing traffic, since frequently that is where the bottleneck is. Also, you don't want to set the priority too high. Its a common mistake to set it to one or some very low number. But all that does is decrease the performance of other traffic on your network without much gain at all. The reason range is so great is so Gamefuel can use Auto-classification to a greater effect without conflicts.
But yea, another long post. Sorry. But as you can see, its really complicated. ::chuckle::
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Topic: How do I set up Gamefuel for... (Read 10644 times)