When we want to play online without problems, it is very important to follow certain recommendations, so that the user experience when playing is the best possible. The main drawback that we find when it comes to online gaming is lag, or also known as high latency or erroneously called “ping”. Latency is one of the enemies of online players, and it means that the game is not in real time and we notice very annoying delays. Another aspect that we must also take great care of is jitter, that is, the variation in latency at a given moment. Today in RedesZone we are going to explain several fundamental tips to improve your experience when playing.
Basic tips to play smoothly
The first thing to keep in mind is the way to connect to the main routerit is always advisable make use of ethernet network cable. This means of connection has many advantages over the Wi-Fi wireless network, such as the following:
- increased speed on download and upload than Wi-Fi (generally, unless you have Wi-Fi 6 and are close to the router).
- Less connection latencysince the cable adds only 1ms of latency to the connection and even less.
- Greater stability with a lower jitterthis means that the latency variation is really low, very close to 0ms, since we are in a wired environment and there is no possible interference with other WiFi networks.
In the event that you have no choice but to connect via WiFi, it is always necessary that you choose to connect on the 5GHz band that is more free of interference than the 2.4GHz band. However, in case you have a computer, our recommendation is that you buy a Wi-Fi 6E router and a compatible card such as the Intel AX210. Thanks to the new Wi-Fi 6E standard, we have a new frequency band at 6GHz, which is capable of providing us with a large real bandwidth, low latency and very low jitter, since there are no interferences in this band ( for now). You can read our complete tutorial on why ping is higher on WiFi and what to do to reduce it.
Once you have chosen the connection method, it is very important to know if we also have other devices (wired or wireless) connected to the WiFi router and consuming bandwidth. If you have other devices that consume very little bandwidth, you shouldn’t notice any lag or high jitter, however, if these other devices are streaming 4K video, P2P downloading, or browsing video websites, then you will. have a problem, because the bandwidth they are consuming is quite large. To fix this, you’ll need to configure the QoS router to play online No problem. Currently all gaming routers have this functionality, which is responsible for prioritizing gaming devices and/or online gaming traffic.
Finally, if the game requires you to have certain open ports in the NAT of your router, you’ll need to either open the ports individually, or set the DMZ to the IP address of your gaming PC or console. Our recommendation is that, if it is a console, you open the DMZ directly to avoid moderate NAT errors. In the event that it is a PC, for security reasons it is advisable to open only the ports that the game is actually going to use, because the DMZ opens all the ports of the router (except those that are opened manually).
In short, if you want to play online without lags or high jitter, follow the following recommendations:
- Always use Ethernet network cable to connect to the router.
- If you have to use Wi-Fi, it had better be Wi-Fi 6E on the new 6GHz band. If you don’t have a compatible router and card, then use the 5GHz band as a second option.
- Activate QoS if you have other devices consuming bandwidth on your local network, regardless of whether they are connected by cable or WiFi.
- Open ports if your game needs it, or directly the DMZ to the console.
As you can see, with these basic tips you will be able to play online without any problem, reducing the latency of the connection to a minimum, as well as the jitter that we may have.
