How to lower your ping

Measure it in your game first

The number that counts is the one your game shows. These games have a built-in display:

• Valorant: Settings, Video, Stats shows your network round-trip time and your incoming and outgoing packet loss, as text or as graphs.
• CS2: Settings, Game, Telemetry turns on Valve's Telemetry HUD, with your ping and a measure of how often network problems cost you a tick.
• Fortnite: Settings, Game UI, Net Debug Stats shows ping and packet loss. Epic notes that you must start a match to see real results.
• Apex Legends: Settings, Gameplay, Performance Display shows frames per second, latency and packet loss.
• League of Legends: press Ctrl+F during a game to see your latency.

For a test outside the game, Epic's latency guide lists a test address for each Fortnite subregion. In Windows, open Command Prompt and run ping with the address followed by -n 50: that sends 50 packets and shows your average. Epic says to read three numbers: the average, the packet loss, and how close the minimum and maximum are.

Two cautions from the same guide. A test on an idle connection can look perfect even when your connection struggles under load, so if your ping is bad while someone is streaming or a download is running, run the test again under similar load. And the ping command uses ICMP packets, while Fortnite's gameplay traffic uses UDP. Epic notes that many networks give ICMP lower priority, so a normal-looking result may not rule out a problem on the path the game actually uses.

Fixes the publishers recommend

• Use a cable. Epic says wireless can add delay due to signal loss, and EA lists a wireless connection among the causes of high ping and packet loss in Apex Legends.
• Keep the connection free while you play. Epic suggests avoiding large downloads, uploads and video streams on the same network, and calls uploads the most disruptive, because most home connections have much less upload capacity than download.
• Restart your modem and router. It is the first step in Epic's list and in Riot's 2021 tips for Valorant's High Average Ping indicator.
• Choose your server. EA says a data center far away can cause high ping and packet loss because your data has to travel further, and Apex lets you pick one under Data Center on the launch screen. Epic recommends Fortnite's Auto matchmaking region, which selects the region with the best ping. In CS2, lowering Max Acceptable Matchmaking Ping restricts the data centers the matchmaker may place you in. In Valorant, a solo player or party leader can choose among the servers in their region with Server Select.
• Turn on QoS or gaming mode on your router, if it has one. Epic says this keeps the game's data moving ahead of large transfers from other devices, so your ping stays steadier when the network is busy. Look for QoS, Quality of Service, Smart Queue or Gaming Mode in the router's settings. Riot's router guide suggests the same when you share your internet with roommates or family.
• If you have to use Wi-Fi, look after it. Epic suggests testing both bands, since 2.4 GHz covers more distance but can be crowded and 5 GHz is faster but has a shorter range. It also suggests moving the router out of closets, basements and blocked spaces, and updating its firmware.
• Check what is running in the background. EA lists lots of applications running in the background among the causes of high ping and packet loss in Apex Legends.

What does not lower your ping

• A faster plan, on its own. Valve describes ping as round-trip latency and notes that it only measures the time it takes packets to cross the network. Respawn's 2021 deep dive put Apex Legends at roughly 60 kB/s at the start of a game, about half a megabit per second. What does raise ping is a full connection: Epic says that if another device fills your connection, the game's data may wait in line behind it and your ping rises.
• More buffering. CS2's Buffering setting smooths over packet loss and jitter, and Valve notes that it adds latency. It trades extra delay for steadier play.
• Graphics settings, when the lag is the network. A low frame rate and a network problem can feel alike. Valve's HUD shows frame time separately so you can tell whether a hitch is a performance issue with your computer or a network problem. Valorant has its own Low Client FPS indicator for the first, and Riot's 2021 fixes for it are on the PC: close other applications, then lower graphics quality.

Where DNS fits

Riot's League support says your provider's DNS servers are sometimes not set up in the best way for online gameplay, and that changing to a public DNS server can increase your connection stability, speed and reliability. Its advanced guide also suggests public DNS servers for a launcher that never seems to start downloading a patch.

DNS is the lookup step: Microsoft describes it as the protocol that maps computer names to IP addresses. None of the publisher pages listed here says a DNS change lowers the ping your game shows.

When the route is the problem

If your home network checks out and your ping is still high, the delay can sit between your provider and the game. Riot's 2015 engineering post on Riot Direct explains that backbone providers and internet providers route traffic along the lowest-cost path, not the lowest-latency path. Its example is a real League player's traffic from San Francisco to Portland that went through Los Angeles, Denver and Seattle: 70 ms, where Riot says a direct trip may have taken 14 ms.

The same post notes that different providers allow different routes, so a player in one house can have very low latency while a neighbour on a different provider fights significant lag.

Epic says a sudden increase in ping is usually caused by how your provider routes traffic: providers send data through internet exchange points, and if one of them is down or congested, your ping can spike. Respawn's 2021 deep dive describes the same stretch of the path, the connection between your provider's network and the game's, where, Respawn says, peering problems result a lot of the time from a weak link between two networks.

Riot's 2016 follow-up adds that a slow route can stick. With BGP, the internet's standard routing protocol, if a faster route goes down and traffic moves to a slower one, a provider can keep using the slower route after the faster one comes back, because the older session is preferred by default.

Riot's wider answer, in the same post, was to build its own network and peer directly with providers, picking up player traffic as close to the player as possible and carrying it over many fewer routers. A player cannot do that, but you can find where the delay starts and report it: Riot's 2021 Valorant guide suggests Tracert to collect network logs, and Epic suggests sending your provider the address you tested, the result and the ping you see in the game.

How NitroPing helps

Your ping depends on the path your internet provider sends your game's traffic along, not only on the distance. NitroPing sends only your game's traffic through one of our relay servers over an encrypted tunnel, which can be a shorter, steadier path than your provider's default route. Everything else on your PC stays on your normal connection.

Pick Auto and NitroPing measures the relays from your PC and uses the one with the lowest latency, or pick a city and it stays there.

What it cannot do: shorten the physical distance to your game's servers, or fix Wi-Fi trouble or a connection that is already full. If your provider's route to the game is already good, the difference will be small.

Common questions

Lower ping in your game

• Valorant
• CS2
• League of Legends
• Fortnite
• Apex Legends
• Rainbow Six Siege
• WARDOGS

More guides

• Packet Loss in Games: Causes and Fixes
• Ping Spikes and Jitter: Causes and Fixes
• Gaming VPN vs Game Optimizer: What to Check