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How To Reduce Jitter In Games

When you are heavily into online gaming, you will have heard all the terms that can affect your performance. From having enough bandwidth to reducing ping and latency can all help you in the heat of battle.

Any game lag will be when you have a time delay between the players and the amount of time it takes for the game server to respond.

What tends to happen is you pull the trigger for your latest frag or headshot. However, because of the network traffic time delay on your connection, you find you missed the kill, and yourself is the one that suffered.

You will find many reasons, yet one not often mentioned is connection jitter. Here, you can learn what is jitter in networking and how does this internet jitter affect your gaming.

Ultimately, by the end, you will find out how to fix jitter for online gaming network jitter packet loss scenario and your internet connection. You can then rise to victory as you deserve.


What is Jitter?

In online gaming, you will see jitter defined where your ping changes over any given period on your connection.

Connections with higher rates of jitter lead to the unpredictability of the network connection and, sadly, the gameplay.

In most cases, gamers like connections, which have low and reliable ping readings. Should a ping be higher, this can be okay because of the reliability, and it won’t affect competitive play too much.

Games with high twitch factor find this area the most concerning, PUBG or team raids in League of Legends will benefit from a lower jitter value. (Read How To Unblock Someone On League)


Why is My Jitter So High?

One of the main reasons for high jitter is the cable internet bandwidth is shared. With multiple users on the same part of the network, you can see a huge difference. WiFi jitter could be high on a local network, as many users will use the same channel.

On the internet, you can see great speeds in the morning and even toward the afternoon, although traffic might suffer dramatically once the evening comes.

Should you have a low ping and fast bandwidth, you could even find your high-speed internet connection isn’t as good as you thought.

Your ping, latency, and your bandwidth are not the full story, and you can get severe packet loss because of your network jitter.

Jitter, or as it is better understood, packet delay variation, is the measurement of the time for packets to get delivered to your computer or device.

If you ping a site that takes 1ms to reply, and another ping takes 10ms, this is a bad case of ping spikes and latency jitter. If at these levels or higher, you can suffer from packet loss.

Many things cause jitter, such as

  • Interference
  • Overloaded network hardware
  • Poor connections

Your email and browsing won’t highlight this yet using Skype or gaming, and you can soon notice the poor experience.

You can check run a jitter/ping test here: https://www.dslreports.com/tools/pingtest

Your connections are tested and rated A+ to F as the service pings various locations during the test.


Is 1 ms Jitter Good?

You may need to check your ping, yet reliable levels of jitter at 1ms on a high-speed internet connection are hardly noticeable.


How Can I Reduce Jitter?

Quality of gaming or VoIP call depends on network environment. Factors include the device, the network type, and firewall or router configuration.

To get the best experience, there are many things to consider.

Local network conditions impact online gaming the most. Packet loss, or more commonly, jitter-induced packet loss, causes a significant impact. WiFi is particularly bad for inducing jitter.

You can sometimes notice the effects of latency at 250ms. Over 600ms and your experience will be terrible; while you always have some latency, the objective is to minimize stuttering.

Reduce jitter by trying the following:

  • Use fixed Ethernet cable for playing rather than WiFi
  • Reduce WiFi packet conflicts by reducing different devices on one channel
  • Avoid large data transfers over WiFi if used for gaming

How Do I Lower My Gaming Latency?

Game lag is the delay between the action and the time it takes for the reaction of the game server. Besides the router being unplugged accidentally, it is one of the most frustrating things gamers experience.

No matter if you were first to fire, if the server lags and your opponent’s connection is faster, they stand more chance to win.


Check Internet Speed and Bandwidth

You don’t need super high-speed internet to game seamlessly, though you should have around 15 to 20 Mbps. Still, it would help if you thought of your bandwidth.

If others share connections such as streaming, video, or downloading, it might strain the connection’s quality.


Try for Low Latency

Network latency is how long it takes for data to reach its destination. The lower the latency, the better. Latency with a ping rate under 150 milliseconds is suitable, though 20ms is terrific for the quality.

Latency depends on more than a broadband connection and can be influenced by the remote server’s location, connection, and router.

Data packets don’t travel in a direct route, and the more points, the longer the delay and chance of packet loss.


Be Close to Your Router

If you have walls, floors, or any other large objects in the way of a wireless signal, it can
have an impact. This is the reason to use an Ethernet cable if possible. Outside of that, be as close to the router in clear sight as possible.


Close Background Apps

Even sites like Netflix or YouTube can affect gamers playing and increase ping and latency. Mae sure to close and apps as you play to fix these issues and get the best connection performance.


Use a VPN

You have seen that packets take various paths to your device and the server; thus, the quality of your high speed can be affected.

Using a VPN can sure help packets take a more direct path to the game server. They use dedicated encrypted tunnels, and if you change the VPN location close to a gaming server. The time packets need to reach is reduced as there are far fewer points.

You can even use a VPN to fix many other issues such as your VOIP call as these suffer from the same problems, and the same fix can make a call clearer.

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