Suppose you are ready with your best strategy and weapon to shoot your opponent first in a shooter game but find your in-game character shot dead by your opponent. If you don’t understand what happened and you notice the screen froze for a moment, it’s a latency issue.
In other words, your game lagged at the prime time when you needed it to be fluent. Game lags are quite inevitable, and it’s a delay between your action and the game server’s reaction. On the other hand, it can be infuriating if your internet connection isn’t in your favour. Are you looking for how to resolve latency issues, especially during gaming?
Latency or network latency is the time required for the data packet to traverse from one place to another. It’s important to reduce the latency to make your experience not pathetic, as described above. Here’s how to resolve latency issues:
Start with Checking the Internet Bandwidth and Speed
It’s important to watch internet speed and bandwidth before you proceed any further regarding how to resolve latency issues. However, you don’t require business-speed internet for a soothing gaming experience. But, the internet speed should be around at least 15 Mbps.
Additionally, you can’t just ignore the bandwidth count of your internet connectivity. If other family members are using the same bandwidth, then you are sharing the overall bandwidth. This will lead to latency issues.
When your family members are performing bandwidth-consuming tasks, it’s obvious to face latency issues. Hence, check out what your ISP promises to provide and what you’re getting. If you’re falling short on bandwidth, then talk to your ISP.
What Should be the Ideal Latency for Gaming?
If you find out nothing wrong with your internet bandwidth, then you should look into the speed. As you already know, latency denotes the time the data takes to reach its destination from its source. Hence, it should be better if the latency is comparatively lower. How to resolve latency issues?
You should have a clear understanding of how much latency is perfect for gaming. For example, you can run a tool to measure internet speed. It should provide you with upload and download speeds along with ping. Ping should be within 150 ms, which is the unit to measure latency. Anything more than that means that you’re suffering from great latency. The lower the ping is, the greater the internet connection.
Reposition Your Router
Your router keeps all your network-enabled devices connected to the internet. It exhibits wireless signals to every computer, smartphone, tablet, smart device, IP camera, and much more. Meanwhile, the wireless signal must pass through the floor, walls, physical objects, furniture, and so on. Now, this can cause latency in your network.
How to resolve latency issues due to interference of physical objects? You can try moving closer to your router and check if this changes the network experience. On the other hand, a router should be somewhere from where it’s easy to reach all devices through Wi-Fi.
If you can’t move your router, then try placing your gaming console at a different angle. Otherwise, you should try to reduce the interference factors originating from home appliances that depend on frequencies too. For example, you must take care of microwave ovens, wireless speakers, and mobile chargers.
Get Rid of Malware
Chances are there that you experience a sloth-like instance on a particular computer. Whereas other devices work fine with the same network connection. If you are suffering from such an issue, then the device itself might have a problem. Reportedly, malware and other online threats can drive a device to perform sluggishly.
You have nothing to do here to improve network speed or reduce latency. Instead, you must check whether your computer is affected by malware and viruses. Running a reliable antivirus software can help your computer recover from online threats. Give an antivirus a try and see if this improves your network experience.
Close all the Background Tasks
Another cause of network latency is your device being overloaded with background tasks. For instance, if you keep applications such as YouTube, Netflix, and web downloads running in the background, it would consume more bandwidth than ever. No doubt, this will harm your gaming experience.
If you are still looking to reduce latency issues, you should close all the background programs and websites. Start with closing all the windows of heavy-bandwidth applications. If that doesn’t improve the situation, then you can manage other devices.
Therefore, it will give your gaming device a space to adjust with the best bandwidth it can work with. Obviously, your gaming device requires more bandwidth, and you have to manage it with other devices. Keep other devices on Airplane mode when you focus on gaming.
Go for Wired Connection
Sharing the same Wi-Fi connection among family members and a huge number of devices can be challenging. As a consequence, you have to suffer from high latency problems. However, there’s a straightforward approach if you still find a low-speed connection.
Wireless connections can be unpredictable, and you can lose internet connectivity at any time. Instead of wireless connections, you can rely on a wired connection. Simply connect your router and the gaming device or device you need minimum latency with an ethernet cable. This should reduce the latency.
Well, you have to remember that the ethernet cable should be of considerable length. On the other hand, your computer or any device shouldn’t be too distant. Otherwise, the latency issues will emerge again.
What else Plans Work?
Network latency issues can be more severe than you can think. It might take numerous solutions and time to show the effect. Meanwhile, you can play on a local server to eradicate the latency on your network.
Additionally, you can restart your router. If the situation deteriorates, then you can reset the router. On the other hand, you can replace your router if it appears to be defective. Upgrading your broadband package can be another solution for resolving latency issues.
