Ping for Gaming
Not all games need the same ping. A battle royale shooter demands under 40 ms. A turn-based RPG is playable at 300 ms. Here's exactly what you need - And how to get it.
Quick Reference
Under 20 ms - Pro level
Imperceptible input delay. Required for professional competitive play. Achievable on fibre with a wired connection.
20–50 ms - Competitive
Excellent for all genres. You will not be disadvantaged by latency at this level in any mainstream game.
50–100 ms - Casual
Fine for most games. You may notice lag in fast-paced shooters. MOBAs, MMOs, and casual games unaffected.
Above 100 ms - Problematic
Rubber-banding and delayed hit detection in any competitive game. Investigate and fix before playing competitively.
Ping targets by game genre
Game developers optimise netcode for specific update rates (tick rates) and tolerate different levels of latency depending on the pace of gameplay. Slower-paced games have more time to compensate for network inconsistency.
| Genre | Examples | Target ping | Max tolerable |
|---|---|---|---|
| FPS / Battle Royale | CS2, Valorant, Warzone, Apex | < 30 ms | 80 ms |
| MOBA | League of Legends, Dota 2 | < 50 ms | 100 ms |
| Fighting | Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat | < 30 ms | 80 ms |
| Racing | Gran Turismo 7, Forza Motorsport | < 50 ms | 100 ms |
| MMO / RPG | World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV | < 80 ms | 150 ms |
| Sports (FIFA/EA FC) | EA FC, NHL, NBA 2K | < 50 ms | 100 ms |
| Strategy / Turn-based | Civilization, Chess.com | Any | 300+ ms fine |
Why ping matters more than speed for gaming
Games require a constant stream of small packets - Your inputs going to the server, other players' states coming back. A 10 Mbps connection handles this comfortably. Gigabit internet does not reduce ping compared to 50 Mbps because ping is determined by distance and routing, not bandwidth.
What degrades gaming performance is high ping and high jitter. Ping determines how late your inputs arrive at the server. Jitter determines whether that delay is consistent or unpredictable. A consistent 60 ms ping is far better for gaming than an average 20 ms ping that regularly spikes to 120 ms. See how jitter and ping differ →
Tick rate and why it affects how ping feels
Server tick rate is how many times per second the game server processes updates. Popular values:
- 128 tick - CS2 matchmaking, Valorant. Updates every 7.8 ms. High ping is extremely noticeable.
- 64 tick - Most Battlefied titles, older COD. Updates every 15.6 ms. Slightly more forgiving.
- 20–30 tick - Some battle royale titles. Less sensitive to ping variation.
On a 128-tick server, a 60 ms ping means your input arrives roughly 8 server updates late. On a 20-tick server, 60 ms is barely 1–2 updates. This is why the same ping feels different across games.
What each genre actually tolerates - And why
FPS and battle royale: the tightest budget
Shooters resolve hits server-side at high tick rates, so your ping directly determines "peeker's advantage" - The player with lower latency sees the other first by exactly the ping difference. At 30 ms vs 80 ms, the lower-ping player effectively gets a 50 ms head start on every corner fight. Aim duels are decided in 150–250 ms of human reaction time, so a 50 ms network handicap is enormous. This is why competitive FPS players treat anything above 40 ms as a real disadvantage, not a preference.
Fighting games: rollback netcode changes the math
Modern fighting games use rollback netcode: the game predicts your opponent's inputs and rewinds a few frames when the prediction is wrong. At 60 fps, each frame is 16.7 ms - So 50 ms of ping means roughly 3 frames of rollback. Up to 2–3 frames, rollback is nearly invisible; beyond that, characters visibly teleport mid-combo. That's why the fighting game community's practical ceiling sits around 80 ms even though the genre looks slower than an FPS.
MOBAs and RTS: click-to-confirm forgiveness
MOBA inputs are mostly point-and-click commands rather than continuous aim, and the game can mask 50–100 ms behind animation wind-ups. You'll feel high ping in skillshot dodges and last-hitting timing rather than in raw aim - Which is why 50 ms feels flawless and even 100 ms remains competitive in most ranked play.
MMOs and co-op: tab-target tolerance
Tab-target combat with global cooldowns of 1–2.5 seconds buffers most latency away. WoW and FFXIV are comfortably playable at 100–150 ms - Players on inter-continental servers do it daily. The exception is high-end raiding with tight movement checks, where 80 ms or less makes mechanic timing noticeably easier.
Racing and sports: continuous physics
These genres simulate continuous physical contact (drafting, tackles, collisions) where positional error grows linearly with latency. At 100 ms, a car traveling 200 km/h has moved 5.5 meters between what you see and where it actually is. Netcode smooths this, but wheel-to-wheel racing and shot-timing in sports titles degrade steadily past 50 ms.
How to reduce your gaming ping
The fixes are the same for every genre: get off Wi-Fi and onto Ethernet, pick the closest server region, and stop background downloads and cloud sync from inflating your latency under load. Router-level changes - QoS, disabling a VPN, and ruling out evening ISP congestion - Cover the rest. We keep the complete step-by-step process, with expected gains for each fix, in our guide to lowering your ping.
Measuring your gaming ping
Your in-game ping counter shows the round-trip time to the game server - This is the number that matters most for gaming. Run our Ping Test to measure your connection's baseline latency to a nearby server. If this baseline is already high (above 50 ms), the problem is at the network level. If the baseline is fine but in-game ping is high, the game server itself may be distant or overloaded.