How to Get Rid of High Ping While Gaming

Theres nothing more annoying in life than high ping ruining a perfect kill streak or a gaming session youve been looking forward to all week. Its sometimes enough to make you want to stop playing a game altogether!

We feel your pain, but you dont need to live with high ping. There are ways to fix it. Well show you what you can try in this article. We tested all the tips and can confirm we managed to lower our ping.

What Does High Ping Mean?

In our opinion, this how ping should be classified:

• Low ping under 20ms. 20-50ms amounts can also qualify as low ping.
• Good/Average ping between 50 and 100ms.
• High Ping over 150ms.

If you have other opinions about what high ping means, please let us know in the comments.

How to Reduce High Ping...

Here are some things to try that should lower your ping:

Get Rid of Bandwidth Hogs on WiFi

Most people play online using WiFi. Its just more convenient you can easily game on your phone or laptop when youre in bed, on the balcony enjoying a smoke, or even on the toilet.

But heres the thing about WiFi the bandwidth is limited. The more devices connected to a network, the more the bandwidth is congested. To avoid high ping surges, we recommend turning off WiFi on devices youre not using while gaming.

For example, if youre gaming on your laptop, only keep it connected to the WiFi network. Disable WiFi access on your phone, tablet, or PS4.

Also, make sure to turn off bandwidth hogs on your device too. Dont keep web-connected apps running in the background. Dont use a torrent client to download movies or keep Chrome open with a YouTube tab playing music while youre in a game of Dota 2.

Use a Wired Connection

Gaming over an ethernet connection is much better than over WiFi. Sure, youre confined to sitting next to the router, but you get much better speeds (and lower ping).

Why?

Because wired connections arent prone to being affected by interferences. For example, your WiFi connection can slow down if you leave the room where the router is. The signal becomes weaker, and your ping gets much higher.

The best advice we can give you is to connect your device to the router with an ethernet cable. If that just isnt possible, you have three options:

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• Game on your device while sitting as close as you can to the router.
• Place the router in the middle of your home to make sure you have equal signal coverage everywhere.
• Use a range extender to boost the WiFi signals strength throughout your home.

Connect to a Nearby Server

If youre too far away from the game server, youll experience higher ping. Its because it takes longer for your device to communicate with the server. Also, the traffic might make multiple stops before it reaches its destination.

For example, if youre in Poland and play on a server in the US, your connection might take this path:
 

Poland à Germany à France à Spain à Portugal à The US

So try playing on a server in your own country if possible, or one in a nearby country. If you need to migrate your account, contact customer support for help.

Use a VPN

A VPN is a service that hides your IP address and encrypts your traffic. It normally slows down your connection speeds, but it can also lower your ping. Heres how:

It routes your traffic through servers that are closer to the gaming server, so that your connection takes a more direct path.

It encrypts your traffic, preventing your ISP from throttling your gaming traffic (slowing it down intentionally).

Worried about slowdowns? The good news is there are fast VPNs for online gaming. Just follow that link to check them out. They usually achieve fast speeds with large server networks and lightweight protocols. ExpressVPN, the top pick, has 3,000+ servers in 94 countries and its own proprietary protocol (Lightway) which is extremely fast. We can confirm ExpressVPN offers great gaming speeds and low ping. We used it while playing CS:GO and Fortnite and we had a really great time.

Try PingEnhancer

PingEnhancer is a free tool that might lower your ping. It does that by tweaking your Windows registry to increase the frequency of TCP packet acknowledgement. That pretty much means it forces your network to check every data packet thats transferred. Since it increases the accuracy of packets, it should lower your ping.

But keep in mind PingEnhancer can also slow down your speeds. Your network scans more packets now, and that takes more time.

Using PingEnhancer is really simple. Just download and install it, then run it and do this:

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• Click the Optimize button.
• Restart your PC.

Thats it. Your connection to the gaming server will be optimized now. In our tests, we managed to decrease ping by as much as 20ms. Also, we didnt notice any slowdowns.

How to Fix High Ping...

Did you only recently started noticing random high ping surges? Heres what you can do to fix that:

• Check the router to make sure its not overheating. If it its very hot to the touch, shut it down for 30 minutes. If that doesnt solve the problem, its a hardware issue, so you need to replace it.
• Also, check that your PC isnt overheating. Use Open Hardware Monitor to check the CPU temperature. If its over 80 degrees, your PC is overheating. Use this guide to cool it down.
• Make sure all your drivers are up-to-date.
• If nothing works, reset your router.

Know Other Ways to Lower or Fix High Ping?

If you do, please tell us about them in the comments. If you use specific online tools to get rid of high ping, dont forget to mention their names and/or include links.