[Minister (old)]

I use the zone labs free firewall. Can someone tell me what changes i could adjust that might effect my game play? I have the fps problem(not saying this will fix it) and I am also in the process of tweeking some of my game configs. was just wondering if someone thinks a certain firewall is better than another for playing UT or online games in general?

[[US]Chris]

im using windows xp sp2 firewall.
running fine atm.

[6th|illogical]

I use NAT via iptables on a Gentoo box running a 2.4.27 kernel patched with an extra set of modules for iptables allowing fun routing stuff.

[HoboHumpinSlut (old)]

NAT via iptables on a 2.6 kernel

had a netgear router before...performed worse.

[dennis (old)]

m0n0wall

[[US]Chris]

Nothing against your firewalls but i think he wants a windows firewall

i used ZoneAlarms a long time ago and i think that the stealth mode was giving me very much CPU consumption problems -> i had to take the mode between normal and stealth to have a normal CPU activity.

[mitsubishi]

Quote

was just wondering if someone thinks a certain firewall is better than another for playing UT or online games in general?

As I understand it,

Gameplay only needs a udp connection between a client and a server, if that is satisfied - which most probably is -, a firewall can affect gameplay negatively only by changing the priorities of those udp packets to come after other packets, or, by loading the processor and ram with its rules. Since the first case most probably does not happen without using software that is made for professional routing and you know what you're doing by using it, you can only be afraid if you computer can't handle running a firewall at all. In that train of thought, not running a firewall at all is the best solution but since that is a security risk and most computers nowadays handle complex firewalls easily, using anything really it's the same and you can only worry about what the firewall can do, how it does it and how much it costs, more than how well that is being done.

[Woekele]

On windows, I use ZoneAlarm too, gives me no problems at all. Of course, an easy test would be, to uninstall all firewalls and then play, to see if theres any difference.

On Linux (yes, I installed ubuntu today), I use firestart, but I think its not even a real firewall, but just a GUI to setup the built-in network-stuff in Linux (iptables and stuff?) Works really nice as far as I can tell. The box is total stealth now.

[space-monkey (old)]

zone alarm pro.
only fps i problem i get is when people toss smoke ( i hate you all)
other than that i get 60fps which is decent for my video card i guess.

[rashly (old)]

Any decent firewall will hurt you while gaming.

I use Outpost, as I think it is the best out there. I still disable it for matches though.