What is packet prioritization

blacklex

Honorable
Apr 7, 2013
147
1
10,690
Might sound like a noob question but on many motherboards there is "packet prioritization" and I'm not completely sure what it means :p
I think I have an idea but if someone could actually explain it to me, that would be great <3
 
Solution
From my understanding in terms of connection it is when you can adjust your QoS (quality of service) to give more bandwidth to a specific device or application and lower the bandwidth to others. I'm assuming it's referring to the built in LAN on the motherboard, as most do.

So basically if you want better ping in games while downloading something, you could prioritize the game, or vice versa. This often requires a router that supports the feature as well, however some applications have it built in (such as uTorrent).

gumbykid

Honorable
Jan 15, 2014
505
0
11,160
From my understanding in terms of connection it is when you can adjust your QoS (quality of service) to give more bandwidth to a specific device or application and lower the bandwidth to others. I'm assuming it's referring to the built in LAN on the motherboard, as most do.

So basically if you want better ping in games while downloading something, you could prioritize the game, or vice versa. This often requires a router that supports the feature as well, however some applications have it built in (such as uTorrent).
 
Solution
Generally it does nothing useful. From a end user machine you would have to have multiple application generating so much traffic that it all can not be sent out the ethernet port. In that case you can select which traffic gets sent and which is to be discarded. Something like a voice application would need to always have its traffic first. In most cases you hit other bottlenecks well before you would saturate a ethernet port.

If this is happening you have misdesigned your applications or undersized your machine. It can only really fix a tiny unexpected delay likely less than a couple milliseconds and most applications are not affected by those tiny delays anyway.