Linksys announced a WRT32X MU-MIMO dual-band 3x3 AC3200 Gigabit WIFI gaming router, it is based on Killer line of networking features, with Rivet Networks’ Killer Prioritization Engine running on a 1.8GHz dual-core ARM CPU.
This built-in "Killer Mode" can automatically detect a Killer-enabled computer, then syncs its Killer engine to the Killer Network Manager on the PC. This means that not only the computer itself but the entire network, hosted by the WRT32x, is tuned for the best gaming experience.
But the router doesn't just work for games only. Linksys says while it prioritizes gaming traffic, it also include features that allows other online activities like streaming or downloads to work smoothly. It's also smart enough to prioritize only the actual gaming traffic and not all traffic related to games. Downloading a patch for a game, for example, will be treated as a regular download and not automatically prioritized.
ost every router has a quality-of-service (QoS) system designed to ensure that lag-sensitive network traffic such as video and VoIP are assigned the highest priority, so that video streams and phone calls aren’t interrupted. The Killer Prioritization Engine is a QoS system in essence, but it’s highly optimized to recognize additional types of lag-sensitive traffic, including games.
“One of the hardest things to do in a QoS system is to figure out what each stream is,” Rivet Networks chief marketing officer Bob Grim told me ahead of CES. “Is it a game, a video, or what? We do it in two ways. First, we look at it heuristically: What type of network traffic is being sent from the Wi-Fi adapter? Is the host PC running DirectX? We can quickly determine game traffic and make it the highest priority. We identify the streams and as we’re sending data to the router, we’re telling the WRT32X what that traffic is and how it should be prioritized. The router will then honor those instructions.”Secondly, we analyze the data packets traveling over the network, because not all packets are created equally. A Microsoft Windows update packet shouldn’t be treated as just as important as a gaming packet. We’ll never queue a gaming packet, for example, because it’s latency dependent.”
The WRT32X is a dual-band, MU-MIMO router capable of delivering theoretical throughput of up to 600Mbps on its 2.4GHz 802.11n network and 2600Mbps on its 5GHz 802.11ac network. It has one gigabit WAN port and a four-port gigabit ethernet switch onboard. The WRT32X also has one USB 3.0 port and a combo USB 2.0/eSATA port for sharing storage over the network (with support for drives formatted with FAT, NTFS, or HFS+ file systems). It’s capable of running open-source firmware (e.g., OpenWRT and DD-WRT), but it’s not clear if you’d be able to replace its native operating system and still run Killer’s QoS engine.
Linksys is pricing the WRT32X Wi-Fi Gaming Router at $299.99 and expects to ship it this spring.
