@Jaybonaut that’s a common misconception! While the word 'pause' sounds like it would cause a spike, these pauses happen at the microsecond level-far too fast for a human or even a game engine to perceive as a lag spike.

The real latency spikes occur when flow control is off. Without it, if a buffer overflows, the packets are simply dropped. Your system then has to detect the missing data and request a retransmission (TCP retransmission), which takes significantly more time than a tiny flow control pause.

Think of flow control like a smart traffic light that keeps cars moving steadily, whereas turning it off is like having no lights at all-eventually, a crash occurs, and everything stops until the mess is cleared. For gaming on a router like the GE800, a steady flow is always better than 'fast but broken' data delivery :)

  @jfunk exactly, for dedicated competitive scenarios, avoiding queued packets is key to preventing rubber banding. However, instead of relying on a binary setting like flow control to manage this, that's where the AI QoS on the GE800 really shines.
While flow control handles the physical link stability, AI qos identifies game packets and ensures they jump to the front of the line without being delayed by other heavy traffic. This effectively solves the latency issue you mentioned without risking the packet loss that can occur when buffers are simply left to overflow. Ultimately, if you're running a clean network solely for gaming, turning off flow control might give you that raw edge, but for most living room scenarios, the AI-driven optimization is a much more surgical way to keep latency at absolute zero

@Jaybonaut 

Vendex and jfunk provided very theoretical and detailed explanations and debates for Flow Control feature on the router. To be honest, both of them are extremely professional, even surpassing my own understanding of Flow Control.

To conclude, it's recommended to keep Flow Control enabled on the GE800 to ensure optimal traffic management for connected devices.

However, if you experience a specific issue with gaming or the network, I'm happy to escalate your case to our support engineers for further investigation to determine whether it's caused by the Flow Control setting.

Pro-gamer wrote

  @Kevin_Z 

Hi Kevin, I have a problem, the MTU must support 1500 for PPPEO. I only use 1492 and that causes internet speed problems. Waiting for TP-Link: The GE800 is a high-end gaming router. You can submit a request to TP-Link Support for a firmware update that supports "Baby Jumbo Frames" (RFC 4638) for KPN/PPPoE.That's confirmation: the firmware of the TP-Link Archer GE800 does not currently support RFC 4638. Without this support, the router cannot send the necessary 1508 bytes (1500 data + 8 PPPoE overhead) over the WAN port, so you are stuck with 1492.

With a 4Gbps connection this is a major problem for two reasons:

Packet fragmentation: Because almost all servers on the Internet send 1500 bytes, your router has to "shop" every incoming packet into smaller pieces. This eats up the processor capacity.

CPU Bottleneck: As mentioned earlier, TP-Link handles PPPoE on a single processor core. Due to the extra fragmentation, that core reaches its limit much faster, so your speed is probably stuck somewhere between 1.5 and 2.2 Gbps.

@Pro-gamer 

I saw you opened another thread to submit this request earlier here.

I'm not seeing other home routers support "Baby Jumbo Frames" (RFC 4638) and allow for configuring the MTU larger than 1500. Do you know any brand or model that supports it already? Kindly share more details with me, and it will be more convincing when we submit feature requests to the development team.

BTW, I also wonder whether the speed problems are caused by the MTU settings on the GE800? How did you determine that? I remember that you can achieve 3 Gbps when your GE800 is running the official 1.2.1 firmware. How about now? With the latest Archer GE800(EU)_V1_1.3.2 Build 20250929 official version, what is the speed you can get?