WNR2000v3 massive ping spikes during online gaming?!?

[octiceps]

A few months ago, I bought a WNR2000v3 300 Mbps router to replace an aging WGR614v6 54 Mbps router that started randomly dropping connection. For the most part, both the wireless and the wired Internet seem to work very fast and stable on this new router, except for one glaring problem: Massive ping spikes in online gaming. I frequently game on my laptop using the WiFi and some online games, such as Battlefield 2, have become unplayable due to severe ping spikes that happen every 30 seconds or so. What I mean is, I'll be running around normally in a shooting game with a ping under 100 and then, suddenly, the ping will start fluctuating back-and-forth from <100 to 500+ for a few seconds, creating a "rubber-banding" effect in which everything onscreen is jerked back-and-forth as if attached to a rubber band. This only happens in certain games, but the most frustrating thing is that it renders these games completely unplayable. This does not happen if I play these games on a wired Ethernet connection to my laptop.

I have fiddled around with all of the various settings in my router wireless configuration and no combination of settings so far has fixed this issue. The router is on the latest firmware. I'm currently running on channel 11, mode at "up to 300 Mbps," and WP2-PSK [AES] encryption. No amount of changing these settings will remedy the problem and, besides the initial Setup Wizard I ran when I first got the router, no other settings were changed from their initial values either. I have also tried port forwarding the specific games where the massive ping spikes have been happening, but to no avail. This kind of thing did not happen with my old router. I would greatly appreciate it if someone would help me figure out how to fix this extremely frustrating problem.