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Packets & Ping You Need For A Perfect Gaming Experience

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Written by Ehsan Batt

Now, it is high time to talk about our internet connections when it comes to online gaming. Yes, the same internet that powers all our battle royal victories and losses. Most importantly, the main reason behind all those moments of defeat where you swore your game was just lagging.

Other than gaming, the internet has become a crucial component of our lives. From our security systems to our home appliances, everything is interconnected, thanks to the internet. However, a common concern everyone faces while online gaming is finding out the ideal download and upload speeds, bandwidth, and pings rates.

We have explored multiple guides and read countless reviews but nothing seems valuable. Therefore, we created a brief guide on the perfect ping and packets you need for online gaming. You can also check out the ever-affordable Spectrum internet plans for faster and reliable service.

Here is what you need to understand first:

What is the latency?

Latency is a key component that influences your gaming experience. In simple words, it is the time taken by the traffic from your system to reach the gaming server, and back again. There is a common misconception among people that you only require raw bandwidth for gaming. If you are playing games that ask fora quick and rapid response from the server, latency will pull the strings.

What is Ping?

Ping is a test that your network performs regularly to measure latency. Your system sends a ping message and measures the time taken by that message to reach the gaming server and back again. Less ping indicates that the message traveled faster.

What is the lag?

Lag is a delay that occurs because of higher ping and latency.

Why latency and ping matters for gaming?

It is common with all the internet service providers to advertise upload and download speeds. Although the upload and download speeds play a crucial role in getting the best out of online gaming, they aren’t the things to look for.

Ping and latency matter the most because of the real-time communication aspect. For example, you are in a battle royal mode and being only half a second out of sync can make you lose the match.

Ping calculates the time your gaming consoles take to respond to the demand of data from the server. High ping rates indicate that you are a few seconds behind everyone else.

What is Packet Loss?

It is a way of accessing your broadband connection. In simple words, it occurs when the small formatted units of data we send and receive over our internet fail to reach their destination. As a result, you experience slow speeds and total loss of connection.

For example, when you are on a video call through Skype, excessive packet loss indicates that there is a little time to resend the data packets in real-time and as a result, you’ll hear distortion and lose the call entirely.

There are countless reasons for packet loss. One of the most common of them being the network congestion. The information you send or receive across the internet has to travel through multiple connections on its way to the final destination. In case, the connections on the way are jam-packed, your packet has to wait for its turn before being passed on to the next step. If network congestion is greater, your packets will be lost along the way.

Ping Rates for the perfect gaming

Most of the people prefer gaming on consoles to play their favorite exclusives and forget the hassle of installing games and software, while others prefer better frames per second and resolution in PCs. Therefore, all of us have different systems and our requirements differ. There is no secret revelation on the ping you need for an ideal gaming experience.

All the multiplayer games require a quick and rapid response from the server and therefore ping rates affect it more than anything else does. The higher is your ping, the longer signals will take to reach the gaming server.

Here are the basic requirements for ping rates in different systems.

PC

  • Maximum Ping rate: 100-150ms

PS4

  • Maximum Ping rate: 150ms

XBOX ONE

  • Maximum Ping rate: 150ms

Ping rates can be improved by using an Ethernet connection, upgrading hardware, and getting faster internet speeds.

 

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Ehsan Batt