1. Fix bufferbloat — the biggest free win
If your ping is fine when the connection is idle and terrible when anything else is downloading, this is your problem, and it is probably the single most impactful item on this page.
The cause is oversized buffers. When traffic arrives faster than a link can transmit, routers queue the excess instead of dropping it. Consumer equipment queues far too much, so your game packets end up waiting behind several seconds of someone else's video upload. Latency under load can rise from 20 ms to well over 1,000 ms.
The fix is SQM (Smart Queue Management) — modern queue algorithms such as fq_codel or CAKE that keep queues short deliberately. Look in your router for "SQM", "Smart Queue", "Adaptive QoS" or "Bufferbloat". Set your download and upload limits to roughly 85–90% of your measured speed — the deliberate sacrifice of a little bandwidth is what buys the latency back.
If your router has no such option, the OpenWrt project supports SQM on a wide range of hardware. Test before and after with a bufferbloat-aware speed test; a grade jump from D to A is common and immediately noticeable in game.
Old-style QoS prioritises game traffic over other traffic. SQM fixes the queue itself, which helps regardless of what the other traffic is. Where both exist, SQM is the one that matters.
2. Use a cable
Wi-Fi is a shared half-duplex radio medium. Collisions cause retransmissions, retransmissions cause variable delay, and variable delay is exactly what ruins the feel of a game. Even excellent Wi-Fi adds a few milliseconds and a lot more jitter than cable.
A cheap Cat 5e cable removes an entire category of problem permanently. If you do nothing else on this list, do this one. Any cable you already own is fine — Cat 6 and Cat 7 marketing makes no difference at these speeds.
3. If cable is impossible, fix the Wi-Fi properly
- Use 5 GHz, not 2.4 GHz. 2.4 GHz has three non-overlapping channels and is shared with microwaves, Bluetooth and every neighbour. 5 GHz has far more room.
- Pick a clear channel. Use a Wi-Fi analyser app to find one nobody nearby is using, and set it manually instead of leaving it on auto.
- Move closer, or move the router. Walls, floors and metal are the enemy. Line of sight matters more than distance.
- Turn off band steering if your device keeps dropping to 2.4 GHz — give the 5 GHz band its own network name and connect to it explicitly.
4. Choose the right server region
Physics sets a floor of roughly 1 ms per 50–70 km of real-world distance. If you are connected to a server on another continent, no setting and no software will save you — you are paying the speed of light.
Check which region your game has selected. Auto-selection frequently gets it wrong, especially after travelling or changing ISP, and some games pick by account region rather than by measured latency. Choosing the nearest datacentre manually is often a 100 ms improvement for zero effort.
5. Stop the background traffic you forgot about
The usual culprits, in rough order of how often they are the answer:
- Game launchers updating other titles in the background — Steam, Epic, Battle.net all do this silently.
- Cloud sync: OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, photo backup on your phone.
- Windows Update downloading, and delivery optimisation uploading to other machines.
- Someone else in the household streaming 4K video.
- Console or phone updates on the same connection.
Steam has a setting to throttle downloads while playing; enable it. Note that if you have fixed bufferbloat properly in step 1, background traffic stops mattering nearly as much — which is why that step comes first.
6. Restart the router — but understand what it does
This works often enough to be worth doing, and rarely for the reason people assume. It clears a saturated NAT table, drops stale connections, and can trigger a fresh DHCP lease that lands you on a less congested segment. What it does not do is change your route or fix a congested transit link.
Power off for a full 30 seconds. If restarting fixes things for a few days and the problem then returns, that pattern itself is diagnostic — it usually points at a router running out of memory or NAT table space, and a firmware update or hardware replacement is the real fix.
7. Check for a duplex or cable fault
A damaged Ethernet cable or a port negotiating at the wrong speed produces packet loss that looks exactly like a network problem. In Windows, check the adapter's link speed — if a gigabit port reports 100 Mbit, suspect the cable. Swap it before assuming anything about your ISP.
Errors on the interface are the giveaway. A healthy link shows essentially none.
8. Leave MTU alone unless you have a specific symptom
MTU tuning appears in every list like this one and is almost always unnecessary. The default 1500 is correct for most connections; PPPoE links typically need 1492 and usually negotiate it themselves.
It is worth checking only if you see a specific symptom: some sites or game servers hanging while others work fine, which suggests fragmentation trouble. Otherwise changing it will not lower your ping, and setting it wrong will create new problems.
Changing your DNS server does not reduce in-game ping — DNS resolves the server address once, before the match, and plays no part afterwards. "Network optimiser" and registry-tweak utilities have no measurable effect on modern Windows. Disabling Nagle's algorithm is irrelevant to games that use UDP, which is nearly all of them.
9. Ask your ISP — with evidence
If a pathping trace shows loss starting on your ISP's own network, that is theirs to fix and they can often do it. Send the raw output and point at the specific hop. Concrete evidence gets you past the first-line script far faster than describing the symptom.
Be aware of the honest limit: if the loss is outside their network, they genuinely cannot fix it. At that point your options are a different provider, or changing the route yourself.
What to do after all of this
Re-measure. Run the same ping -n 50 test you started with and compare the minimum, maximum and loss figures against your notes.
| Result | What it means |
|---|---|
| Fixed | Done. You did not need to buy anything. |
| Better but still spiky | Something local remains — most often Wi-Fi. Keep working on the local side. |
| Unchanged, and the trace shows a clean local network with the damage far out in transit | You have hit the limit of what free fixes reach. |
Only if you land in that last row
A bad transit route is the one cause on this page with no free fix. Your ISP picked that path for commercial reasons, and nothing on your own equipment can change it.
Rerouting software sends your game traffic over a different path to the server. It is the correct tool for that specific situation and useless for the other eight items above — which is why it appears at the bottom of this page rather than the top.
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