Chris Rogers2 said:I couldn't find anything useful in the app texts or logs besides total transmitted packets, overhead, and stuff like that, so I just grabbed a Wireshark capture of some gameplay. Ping was steady at 42-43.
Basically, most of the packets (UDP) range from 57 bytes on the wire (15 bytes of data) to 72 bytes on the wire (30 bytes of data), making up about 70% of the traffic. Then, from 73 bytes on the wire (31 data) up to 212 on the wire (170 data), that’s another 20%. The remaining 10% are the outliers, ranging from 218 on the wire (176 data) up to 789 on the wire (747 data).
The absolute max I captured was 909 bytes on the wire, which is 867 bytes of data.
Sent you the log via DM.
Whoops, turns out 100M is actually a bit much for me...🙂
Anyway, you've basically done all the heavy lifting with the analysis already. The real takeaway here is that gaming UDP packets are tiny. Most frames—whether they're running over local Ethernet or some LTE/broadband connection—are basically empty shells, which means huge overhead (even if WAN frames aren't strictly fixed lengths). Even the biggest UDP packet stays within that 1432-byte end-to-end limit, so we aren't dealing with any fragmentation issues.
What we're still guessing at is whether those UDP packets are splitting across both links during edge cases. If they are, you might run into resequencing headaches, but honestly, the game's own TCP/IP stack usually handles that. Typically, if you're pushing UDP over LTE but receiving it over broadband, you'll get hit with a massive RTT difference between the two paths. The big question is: is the router shifting the entire connection/UDP port XX over to LTE, or is it just dumping the "extra" traffic onto LTE? We just don't know.
Then you've got IPTV streaming (and VoIP), which wants the exact opposite—bigger, jumbo frames. On decent layer 2+ manageable gear, Ethernet usually lets you push 8K to 9K packets, and high-end switches or routers can even handle up to 64K.
So, theoretically, you could tweak the settings on your PC to drop the Ethernet frame size from the standard 1512 down to something like 1024, and crank the TV up to 8192 to boost performance for both.
But man, we're back to square one: you don't have root access to the router. You can optimize things locally all you want, but it doesn't mean squat once the frame hits the broadband or LTE link. The router is just going to repackage everything into whatever frame size it agreed upon with the ISP's equipment or the cell tower, and you've got zero say in that process.
Sadly, I don't see any way to squeeze more performance out of this unless you've got full control over the router.
