How to lower ping & reduce latency for gaming?

If you’re trying to lower ping & reduce latency for gaming – here’s exactly what we’d do to improve your internet connectivity.

Ping is effectively your latency between your PC and a server. Latency is the time it takes for a device to receive a signal from another device, and you can imagine how important this becomes when you’re online gaming. We’ve already taken a look at what a good ping speed is for gaming, and also why your ping might be high. Once you’ve ascertained those – you can then have a go at lowering ping.

There’s a few ways to lower ping – the easiest being through the use of network management tools. That’s not the only way to lower ping, though, as you can manually reduce it through intuition and organisation.

How to lower ping for online gaming?

Closing background applications is one of the best ways to lower your ping. For example, applications such as Discord and Skype often interfere with ping. Alongside that, having Chrome open can drastically leech not only your internet bandwidth but your CPU power too. If you’re online gaming, we’d recommend you ensure that you only have your game open and only any relevant applications.

We’d also recommend you run malware scans to find out if you have any hidden applications secretly taking up a portion of your internet bandwidth.

Aside from these methods – there’s a few other things we’d recommend you have a think about doing:

• Limit your frame-rate (FPS and textures require more internet bandwidth)
• Use a wired connection between your PC / Console and router.
• Use the best gaming router
• Disconnect unnecessary devices from router

We can’t guarantee that any of these methods will definitely alter your ping for the better, though we do think they will all play a part in reducing it. The last solution to lowering your ping is upgrading your internet with your ISP, however, this can be expensive and time consuming, and could ultimately end up changing nothing.

Is lowering ping the same as reducing latency?

These are effectively the same thing. Latency is near identical to ping, and is used in more technical situations, such as networking and server technology. Ping is a slightly more colloquial term used widely by gamers, for gamers.

Read More: What is ping in gaming?

We’re going to be keeping an eye out for everything related to ping, but in the meantime you might be interested in reading about if 100mbps is fast enough for gaming, and what the differences are between routers and modems for gaming.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you lower ping with software?

You can lower ping with just software, however this is a very temperamental fix.

How do you get 0 ping?

You can have 0 ping if you use a wired connection, and you are potentially the only other node on the network. It’s unlikely you will consistently have 0 ping as it’s such a temperamental speed.