Ways to reduce ping for multiplayer games

[Spev]

Just wondering what additional steps I could take to benefit my online experience. I have a pretty decent router & use QoS to prioritize bandwidth to my PC & gaming console. But my ping never seems to be that great. My house is fairly old (built back in the 90s) & I'm not sure if the wiring could be affected my games. I don't seem to have packet loss or anything like that. My connection overall is fine, I'm just being a nerd & seeing how I could improve my ping online since I mainly play competitive multiplayer games, connection makes all the difference.

 

Any ideas are appreciated.

[RedSphyxis]

Just wondering what additional steps I could take to benefit my online experience. I have a pretty decent router & use QoS to prioritize bandwidth to my PC & gaming console. But my ping never seems to be that great. My house is fairly old (built back in the 90s) & I'm not sure if the wiring could be affected my games. I don't seem to have packet loss or anything like that. My connection overall is fine, I'm just being a nerd & seeing how I could improve my ping online since I mainly play competitive multiplayer games, connection makes all the difference.

 

Any ideas are appreciated.

a better internet connection.

 

and always choose the server/region with the lowest ping. Even with SUPERFast connection you'll still have a a high ping when you play on a region that's halfway around the globe

[Samfisher]

Just wondering what additional steps I could take to benefit my online experience. I have a pretty decent router & use QoS to prioritize bandwidth to my PC & gaming console. But my ping never seems to be that great. My house is fairly old (built back in the 90s) & I'm not sure if the wiring could be affected my games. I don't seem to have packet loss or anything like that. My connection overall is fine, I'm just being a nerd & seeing how I could improve my ping online since I mainly play competitive multiplayer games, connection makes all the difference.

 

Any ideas are appreciated.

Call your ISP to optimize their route to the game servers you frequent.

[Spev]

what games are you talking about? i had really bad ping in CSGO and a few others but it was fine in other games. are you on Ethernet? 

Yeah on ethernet. On PC I play CSGO & LoL. On console (I know cringe) I play Gears of War, Halo, and occasionally COD. 

 

 

a better internet connection.

 

and always choose the server/region with the lowest ping. Even with SUPERFast connection you'll still have a a high ping when you play on a region that's halfway around the globe

That wouldn't help my ping though? Unless you mean a different ISP. Just upgrading my connection DL & UL shouldn't affect my PING?

[Spev]

Call your ISP to optimize their route to the game servers you frequent.

Interesting idea, I didn't know they could take such requests.

[Enderman]

1) better internet

 

2) minimize the number of hubs/switches/routers between you and the land line

 

3) dont use any gaming or networking optimization/prioritization software

if the router can prioritize IP addresses then thats fine, that shouldnt add any delay

[RedSphyxis]

Yeah on ethernet. On PC I play CSGO & LoL. On console (I know cringe) I play Gears of War, Halo, and occasionally COD. 

 

 

That wouldn't help my ping though? Unless you mean a different ISP. Just upgrading my connection DL & UL shouldn't affect my PING?

By that I meant a better internet plan; FASTER SPEEDS will always mean lower pings.

 

The only exception is that if you go onto a server that's let's say on australia your PING will be High no matter the speed of your internet since your connection needs to go through more nodes than usual building up the PING

[Samfisher]

Interesting idea, I didn't know they could take such requests.

Some do, especially those that advertise gamer packages.

 

 

By that I meant a better internet plan; FASTER SPEEDS will always mean lower pings.

 

The only exception is that if you go onto a server that's let's say on australia your PING will be High no matter the speed of your internet since your connection needs to go through more nodes than usual building up the PING

Faster speeds have nothing to do with ping.

[MegaDave91]

Erect a shack outside a server center.

[Spev]

Erect a shack outside a server center.

 

Consider it on my bucket list.

1) better internet

 

2) minimize the number of hubs/switches/routers between you and the land line

 

3) dont use any gaming or networking optimization/prioritization software

if the router can prioritize IP addresses then thats fine, that shouldnt add any delay

I just use QoS for the router on the web based GUI, I don't use anything else for any kind of software.

[RedSphyxis]

Some do, especially those that advertise gamer packages.

 

 

Faster speeds have nothing to do with 

yeah it does but not in the sense that you're thinking of,

 

With a Faster internet connection/plan the ISP will usually direct your traffic onto a "premium" connection. Which basically is a connection with lesser traffic hence lesser pings.

[Samfisher]

yeah it does but not in the sense that you're thinking of,

 

With a Faster internet connection/plan the ISP will usually direct your traffic onto a "premium" connection. Which basically is a connection with lesser traffic hence lesser pings.

Usually?  I've never known an ISP that have high bandwidth routes just for people on faster plans.

[RedSphyxis]

Usually?  I've never known an ISP that have high bandwidth routes just for people on faster plans.

that's because ISPs dont tell you that.

 

if they had a 10Gb node and there would be 1000 people with 10Mbps connections it would certainly have higher traffic, while a 10Gb node with only 10 people with 1Gb connections would certainly have lesser.

 

it's simple ISP magic really

[Spev]

oh well CS:Go ping is basically unfixable. i played it for like a year but my ping started getting in the 200s and i couldnt even join matches because of it. thats not uncommon. not sure why league would be doing that, or the console gaames though. how can you even tell high ping on a console game..?

Well you can run a ping test on the dashboard, and if you are connecting to a game server it usually tells you the ping. & then there's shooting people & them not dying & having them spin & shoot you & you dying

[schizznick]

Ping is not affected by speeds. Ping is affected in several ways: 

 

1. Number of hops between you and destination

2. Type of technology used between you and destination (ie. DSL vs. Fiber vs. Cable)

3. Software that analyzes/opens packets. (ie. Firewall and IPS)

4. Network Congestion

 

I would also like to clarify that no ISP I am aware of has multiple routes to improve latency. It is possible to have routes for customers on SLA's for redundancy purposes. Most ISP's oversubscribe internet connections. If they have a 1Gb pipe then they will sale 1.5Gb or higher of services on that connection. That is because most of the time people are not using all the bandwidth they pay for. Often when a network is congested they may add more capacity to stem the tide. Again this does not mean that alternate routes don't exist, but they are not for the purpose of reducing latency. 

[Centurius]

By that I meant a better internet plan; FASTER SPEEDS will always mean lower pings.

 

The only exception is that if you go onto a server that's let's say on australia your PING will be High no matter the speed of your internet since your connection needs to go through more nodes than usual building up the PING

No they won't, better connections mean lower pings. Fiber will usually have less ping than say Coax or DSL. The fact that it is also accompanied with a higher speed most of the time is a coincidence but not the cause of improved ping.

[RedSphyxis]

No they won't, better connections mean lower pings. Fiber will usually have less ping than say Coax or DSL. The fact that it is also accompanied with a higher speed most of the time is a coincidence but not the cause of improved ping.

read my posts after that please

[braneopbru]

When we refer to ping, we are generally referring to round trip time (RTT), that is, the time that it takes for a single packet to travel to a remote computer and and acknowledgement (ACK) packet to be received back from the remote computer indicating that our data packet was indeed received and was not corrupted.

 

There are a number of factors that will contribute to the latency, increasing the RTT.

 

The most basic and unavoidable delay is propagation delay. Propagation delay is the time that it takes for the signal to actually travel through the wiring to your destination. This is about 70% of the speed of light. So data travelling through copper (or optical fiber) will propagate through the medium at a speed of roughly 200km/ms. That is obviously incredibly fast, but if the server you are connecting to is just 500km away, that round trip of 1000km is going to take 5ms IF YOU HAD A DIRECT CONNECTION, which you don't. Propagation is something that can not be changed, we must accept it as what is is.

 

Then we have bandwidth delay. This is the time that it takes for your network interface to actually place the packet on the transmission medium. This is also where the "Does speed affect ping" question comes into play. Let's say that we have a 100Mbps network interface on our computer. That interface can place 100 bits on the medium per microsecond (µs). If you have a standard 1500 byte ethernet packet, we have 12,000 bits (1500x8) to send out. It will take 120 µs for the packet to be placed on the line. If we have gigabit interface to work with that can place bit on the medium 10 times faster, our bandwidth delay is on tenth as long, 12 µs. However, if our WAN connection is only 1Mbps, the modem will only be able to transmit at a rate of 1 bits/µs, meaning that the bandwidth delay at our modem causes our 1500 byte packet to take 12000 µs (12 millisecond) to transmit. 

 

So the answer is obviously then, yes, a faster connection WILL reduce latency. How much of a difference upgrading from a 1Mb plan to a 3Mb actually make in the real world? Essentially none. If you want to talk about going from a 1Mb upload package to a 20Mb upload package though, then THAT is a totally different story. That 12 ms bandwidth delay would be brought down to just 600 µs (0.6 ms). 

 

This brings us to our next source of latency: Store and Forward.

 

This is the just the way that ethernet works. When your packet arrives at a switch, the switch will receive the ENTIRE packet before reading the next next hop and transmitting it back out again on the appropriate port. Every time that your packet is sent from one switch to another, it introduces a bandwidth delay while that switch is transmitting the packet and it will experience a propagation delay travelling from that switch to the next one along the line. Granted, at the speeds of the networks that make up the backbone that your packet travels across, bandwidth delays are negligible, they do still exist. Don't forget, this happens both ways on the round trip.

 

The next one is where delays can add up quick. Queue delays. Once a switch receives your entire packet, it must re transmit it on another port; but what if that port is busy with another transmission? Your packet must wait in line, along with all the other packets waiting in line for it's turn. When packets are waiting in queue waiting to be transmitted, it is called contention. When the queue buffers fill to capacity, the switches begin to drop packets altogether. This is called congestion. This is where you see very large increases in ping times, where your computer is beginning to  re transmit lost packets.

 

One more delay that is especially important with real time traffic is the fill delay. The standard IP packet size is 1500 bytes, the minimum being 64 bytes. Anything lower than 64 bytes will be padded with blank data up to the 64 bytes. Depending on how quickly data is being created and a lot of other really complicated shit that I'm not even going to begin to pretend to understand, it takes a certain amount of time to actually create enough data to fill a packet. Larger packet sizes will allow a greater throughput, but smaller packets have the potential to lower latency at the expense of throughput. Smaller packets have lower fill times, lower bandwidth delay and obviously lower store and forward delays, while the propagation delays will stay the same. Any packet loss will have a lower affect on your connection as well since you will have less data that needs to be re-transmitted. Again this does come at an expense of throughput since by using packets of 576 bytes, for example, you are going to have to use three times as much data for the packet headers.

 

Conversely, large packets can also add delays. If you are sending 1500 byte packets and one of the hops on the route only supports 1400 byte packets, at some point, that packet will have to be fragmented into two smaller packets thus introducing yet more store and forward delays and bandwidth delays.

 

It's pretty easy to discover the maximum MTU along your route and adjust the MTU settings on your interface, but Windows should be doing this automatically already anyway. You can also try lowering your MTU to 576 bytes and see if you can get a decrease in latency. But be ready for unexpected results.

 

TL;DR:

 

There is pretty much nothing you can do to lower ping other than to get the best package you can afford from your ISP, connect to your (not $20) router via ethernet and select the closest possible server.

[braneopbru]

yeah it does but not in the sense that you're thinking of,

 

With a Faster internet connection/plan the ISP will usually direct your traffic onto a "premium" connection. Which basically is a connection with lesser traffic hence lesser pings.

Also, this is totally and utterly wrong. 

[RedSphyxis]

Also, this is totally and utterly wrong. 

a guy from from tom's hardware explains this better and I already explained this on another post, how about reading it first?

 

 

 

Basically think of connecting to the Internet servers in different states like actually driving from your house to that server location. There will be delays on some roads (trying to get over the George Washington Bridge for example) as compared to some other roads you fly on (Interstate 80). Everytime your reach a high metro-area you need to change 'highways' which adds to the delays. That is how the Internet and a 'ping' is, the ping is how long it takes to 'drive' from your computer to the distant point AND BACK. So your ping may be 40-50 TO it, but round trip is 80-100. 

Basically faster internet speeds/plan will have lesser traffic since that's the kinds of "magic" ISPs do when people pay for better plans, with better plans you'll get onto a node where there are lesser people that cause lesser traffic.

 

Why are you even contradicting me when you're TL;DR is the same as what I'm saying? 

 

 

There is pretty much nothing you can do to lower ping other than to get the best package you can afford from your ISP, connect to your (not $20) router via ethernet and select the closest possible server.

 

 

ISPs separate people with different plans into different nodes, the faster ones basically share a node with fewer people. 

 

edit: and you're too technical this isn't anandtech where people are freaking pciky with details. you have to tone it down for normal guys to understand your explanation will basically make people skip the entire thing and move on to the TL;DR

[braneopbru]

.....edit: and you're too technical this isn't anandtech where people are freaking pciky with details. you have to tone it down for normal guys to understand your explanation ......

I've shared my knowledge on a VERY technical subject in the most straight forward and non technical way that I know how to. If you or anybody else makes the choice to remain ignorant, that is out of my control; do as you wish.

 

As far as me saying the same thing as you in the TL;DR: no, not at all.

 

We could both say that a refrigerator will cool your beer and both be right. But if you said that this happens by the refrigerator making the air inside of it cold, you'd be wrong. If I said that a refrigerator cools your beer by removing the heat from the beer and pumping it into the room, I'd be right. To someone who doesn't understand the technical working of a refrigerator, your explanation might even sound like the more obvious and correct one; but that doesn't change the fact that it is wrong.

 

So please, go ahead and point us to some information that shows how ISPs are using more efficient routing for their higher paying customers; I don't know about anybody else, but to me "a guy on Tom's Hardware" probably isn't a source to be taken as hard evidence.

[RedSphyxis]

I've shared my knowledge on a VERY technical subject in the most straight forward and non technical way that I know how to. If you or anybody else makes the choice to remain ignorant, that is out of my control; do as you wish.

 

As far as me saying the same thing as you in the TL;DR: no, not at all.

 

We could both say that a refrigerator will cool your beer and both be right. But if you said that this happens by the refrigerator making the air inside of it cold, you'd be wrong. If I said that a refrigerator cools your beer by removing the heat from the beer and pumping it into the room, I'd be right. To someone who doesn't understand the technical working of a refrigerator, your explanation might even sound like the more obvious and correct one; but that doesn't change the fact that it is wrong.

 

So please, go ahead and point us to some information that shows how ISPs are using more efficient routing for their higher paying customers; I don't know about anybody else, but to me "a guy on Tom's Hardware" probably isn't a source to be taken as hard evidence.

it's not something you find on the internet it's an industry thing, "stuff you learn through people" you would be lucky to find a source on that. So I'm sorry if I can't point you to any reputable source. But go ahead and ask someone who works for an ISP they will tell you that connections are segregated.(Do ask someone that knows what's going on not just some random desk clerk)

 

Imagine this, would you mix a person with 1 Gbps speed with 900 other connections that are 1 mbps? (It's the same logic as humans have been doing on social classes, the rich are with the rich and the poor with the poor.) Now if that node is soo congested it would be faster if the connection just finds another node that isn't congested hence bringning up the ping as connection uses more nodes.

 

and even if that's a just a guy on tom's hardware, we're also just guys on LTT so what makes you think the stuff we blurt out isn't as unreliable as his? Food for thought.

 

Tom's Hardware has more reliable people than this forum. Have you even seen the trolls here? many people post shit unrelated to tech here and a lot of threads get troll answers mostly because the community is much younger and immature than tom's hardware.

 

 

edit: From what I remember from my networking classes Latency is dependent on 3 main things The Connection, Distance and the Congestion. That basically answers it.

[Becca757]

Hi

 

The ping increases because of the number of hops and nodes between you and the game server you are trying to connect to. Despite of your decent internet connection, you will get high ping if you are trying to connect to the server far from your location. You will also experience high ping when there is rush on your ISP. A gaming VPN can help you out with this problem but before that first do these steps.

 

 

• Switch to wired connection if you are playing on wireless. Connect a cable before playing.
• Stop all the downloads, torrents etc in the back before playing. This is important because they would be consuming bandwidth.
• Try to play in your own region or server close to your location. The more far you go the higher ping you get.

If you still face problem playing online then I would suggest using a gaming VPN. There is one you can try, Kill Ping. This runs at the back of your game optimize your game route with their own servers so you would get the shorter path to game server hence less ping. It works great on lag in Dota 2 and LoL lag. I have researched a bit and found these guyz and their live chat was very helpful to me. Talk to them and share your problem they would find a way to help.

Worked for me. Try for yourself.