Wi-Fi vs Ethernet for gaming: how much difference does a cable make?
UPDATED
A cable usually saves a few milliseconds of ping and removes most of the random spikes. How to measure the difference on your own setup.
Short answer: a cable rarely changes your average ping by more than a few milliseconds. What it changes is the spikes. Wi-Fi shares the air with every other device and every neighbor's network, and it has to retransmit whenever something interferes. Those retransmissions are the random 80ms spikes that kill you in a fight.
Measure it yourself
Run the Rekt-al Net test on Wi-Fi, then press “Wi-Fi vs cable” on the result. Plug in the cable, turn Wi-Fi off (otherwise your PC may keep using it), and run the second test. You get both results side by side. Use the Long mode for both runs if your problem is occasional spikes.
Can't run a cable?
- Use 5GHz (or 6GHz), not 2.4GHz. Less range, but far less interference.
- Fewer walls. Every wall, especially concrete, costs signal and causes retransmissions.
- Mesh with a wired backhaul is great. Mesh over Wi-Fi only adds another wireless hop.
- Powerline adapters are hit and miss. In good wiring they beat Wi-Fi, in old wiring they add their own jitter. Test them like you would test Wi-Fi.
- Disable Wi-Fi power saving in your network adapter settings on laptops.
When the cable doesn't help
If the cable result is just as bad, the problem is further upstream: the router under load (bufferbloat), your ISP, or the distance to the server.