I’m looking in my Nvidia control panel, and because my motherboard has Nvidia networking, there’s an option for Adjust Teaming configuration.
In there it lists two options: Combine the network adapters, or combine the network adapters.
When I hover over Combine my network adapters, it says it increases bandwidth, combines my network adapters to appear as a single configuration, and then says a typical usage scenario: Your system is operating as a file server.
Well, I don’t serve files, so I don’t need to improve my performance for that purpose.
On the other hand, next to the option Combine my network adapters, it says (recommended).
So my question is:
Will my network gaming (most of which is Internet) be improved (or negatively impacted) at all by using this option?
I play Supreme Commander, Neverwinter Nights, and Vanguard. I have Extreme Cable, and a super-fast gaming router.
Basically what that does is runs your two adapters in parallel, so instead of a 1 Gb/s connection to your router, you have a 2 Gb/s connection. 1 Gb/S is already far more bandwidth than you will ever use, so unless I’m missing something important, (very possible) it won’t help at all.
For gaming, bandwidth and throughput are quite a bit less important than latency (the actual amount of time it takes for packets to travel from A to B, NOT how many packets can get there in a certain time period). Latency is dependent on so many factors outside your control – your ISP’s networking equipment, random 3rd party equipment on the way to the destination, the destination ISP, time of day, etc., that doing anything with your network card is pretty unlikely to improve it.
Also, your connection through your ISP will not give you anywhere near 2Gbps over the internet anyway. The only thing you’d possibly see improved is file transfer (incl. things like video streaming, etc.) to your local network, assuming you have all Gigabit equipment and multiple machines transferring or streaming to/from the machine in question.