Wi-Fi Dual Station is the name of what appears to be quite the leap for latency-sensitive gaming where a wired connection remains top but for how long? Probably forever but the gap is getting shorter.

Qualcomm together with Acer, AMD, Lenovo, Microsoft, Snapdragon Compute Platforms and Valve teamed up to enable this new tech that uses multiple Wi-FI bands and antennas concurrently. As they said in the "By simultaneously utilizing the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz band (or 6 GHz where available), latency issues in one band can be easily resolved at a system-level both quickly and transparently to the end user".

Already supported on Steam from Valve with their Steamworks SDK but it's currently limited to Windows 11. As for Linux support? That remains to be seen. It probably won't be long before someone works on it.

Here's the thing though — we expect Valve at some point to come out with a wireless VR headset and there's been patents and leaks that give some good supporting evidence towards that (that we've covered in previous articles). A standalone set would no doubt run Linux too so this is likely part of Valve's plan.

"We’re seeing considerable reductions in jitter and packet loss with Wi-Fi Dual Station enabled, especially when the AP is heavily loaded," said Fletcher Dunn at Valve. "This is important for any online title, and especially beneficial for competitive online titles such as CS:GO and Dota 2. Games using the Steamworks SDK for networking will experience these same benefits with no added development time."

From what Valve developer Fletcher Dunn mentioned on in a short thread, some work on this will be added to their open source .