Ever been in the middle of an intense online gaming session only to have everything lag out as soon as someone else in the house logs on? Well if Netgear are to be believed, they reckon they’ve got you covered with a couple of new routers targeting gamers – the Nighthawk Pro Gaming WiFi Router (XR500) and the Nighthawk Pro Gaming SX10 10G/Multi-Gig LAN Switch (GS810EMX).
The trick is apparently in their software, which attempts to optimise the network conditions for gaming by attempting to stabilise hyperactive pings and reduce lag spikes. It also provides a host of network analytics via it’s Gaming Dashboard, offering an opportunity for more technical folk to dig in and play with settings themselves.
The Gaming Dashboard sounds pretty neat. As well as giving you a real-time bandwidth utilisation reading per device, it shows you ping delays, offers a geo-filter to limit the selection of servers and connections to something more local. Perfect for games that default to an international server when they don’t have too.
Equally neat is the two 5-speed multi-gig uplinks on the GS810EMX. According to Netgear, they’ll let you “increase speeds and expand the bandwidth of your network with ports that automatically adapt to deliver 100Mbps, 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps, 5Gbps or 10Gbps”, giving you lots of flexibility.
Details on pricing and availability for both the XR500 and the GS810EMX are expected to be announced at a later time.