Have you ever played online games? Well, in today’s society, many people tend to spend their free time going online and playing a session or two with some friends. For some people, online gaming is better than single-player games because they can socialized with each other, like their team mates, for example.
Despite all the fun it may bring, there’s one thing that most players are frustrated about: lags. In online gaming, the internet speed is everything. With a better connection, you can get much less ping, which makes your game runs smoother.
Many players are experiencing lags in so many ways, and the reasons why it might happen in the first place are pretty random. On one day, you can suddenly get bad pings due to the poor performance of your internet provider. Or maybe, someone is downloading something that makes the connection runs slower.
Things like this often happen around us, and if you’re facing the same problem, we’re ready to help you out with the best tips to lower the ping and improve the overall gaming experience. Without further ado, let us go to the first one.
How To Lower Ping And Improve Gaming Performance
1. Used Wired Connection
If you tend to use a wireless connection, try to change into wired one. This will make the connection much better since the connection is direct, and the router doesn’t have to work hard to share the connection wirelessly.
Connection through a wired connection will likely make your ping better in most online games. With less signal loss, you can always maintain smooth gameplay for the whole session.
2. Check The Internet Connection
If you already did the first method and still experiencing some lags and high pings, maybe the problem is actually your internet provider. After connecting your device with the Wifi router, you can open up some speed test tools (which mostly free) to check whether your connection is stable or not.
The steps are generally easy. All you need to do is to open the tool, select the server (usually chosen automatically), and then it’ll determine the upload and download speed. Make sure that at least you have a 2-3 MBps connection. Otherwise, your game will be laggy and less enjoyable to play.
3. Consider Using a Gaming VPN
The VPNs may come for different purposes, and as for the gaming VPNS, these tools will help you to reduce the pings by directly connecting your device to the nearest game server. The VPNs will let you choose any locations that are the best suited for you. Now, since not every VPN service is great, it’s important to choose a best-quality VPN that is optimized for gaming traffic. With an optimized connection, you will likely meet much fewer connection problems while gaming. Having a stable connection can make you gain more winnings!
4. Close Background Apps
The lagging you’ve experienced can also be caused by the low memory on your device. Usually, the background apps will take some memory, which might cause the lags in the gameplay. So, if you’re planning to have long gaming sessions, close any unnecessary apps in your background.
The more apps you clear, the more memory you’ll have for gaming. Other than manually closing them, you can also use some gaming apps which usually have this feature installed. That way, each time you open a game, the tool will close the background apps automatically.
5. Optimize Your Games
Some games come pretty optimized out of the box, but many of them don’t. The lags in games can also be caused by poor optimization. So, to counter this problem, you have to adjust some settings in the game accordingly.
If you can’t run the game at high settings, simply turn into medium or low settings, and see whether the FPS is better or not. Find the balance between the quality and performance. As for the first-person shooting online games, we highly recommend using the lower settings since the FPS may provide huge benefits.
6. Use Gaming Router
Do you know that there are gaming routers that are specifically aimed for the gaming market? Yes, these routers can also be a great tool to help in lowering the connection latency and putting you in prioritized gaming traffic.
The price might be higher than the basic routers, but seeing how beneficial it could be, there’s nothing wrong with investing in a gaming router, especially if you want to be more serious in playing online games.
Since the connection is optimized and reliable, you’ll experience lower ping and lags that way. We highly recommend products from reputable vendors, such as Asus or Razer, that come in high-quality and a long list of reliable features, such as Wi-Fi 6 technology, traffic prioritization, and more!
7. Don’t Play During Busy Hours
Generally, most people will play online games during peak hours, which is in the evening or night. Since most people have days off during weekends, most Saturdays and Sundays are also filled with the most players.
If you want to experience a much more stable connection and less ping, we highly recommend playing during off-peak hours, like early in the morning, or late at night. During these times, there are fewer players in the game, which makes the servers more stable.
