Forums | MacLife

Playing games over the Internet is a lot easier than it used to be. Nobody wants to go back to the days of modem initialization strings, manually entering IP addresses, and getting disconnected whenever someone else picked up the phone. With the advent of broadband internet and home networks, users discovered a whole host of new problems related to that wonderful invention: the home router. Opening ports, other people saturating your network connection and messing up your game, IP address conflicts, you name it.

Modern games, operating systems, and routers are a lot friendlier than they used to be. For the most part, as long as your roommate doesn't leave BitTorrent running or try to stream high bitrate audio or video, the games will work. Just click the button to "allow access" when the game pops up the Windows Firewall (or whatever firewall you have installed) the first time and you should be good to go. Right?

Well, not always. Home networking can still be a headache, and for performance-critical apps like gaming and VOIP, doubly so. These tips will help you decide which router to use for gaming and how to configure it to get the highest performance and least trouble from your games. Continued...

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 … 946,00.asp