Does a VPN Lower Your Ping? A Test You Can Run

A reader emailed me in August after buying a VPN subscription specifically because an advert promised "lower ping in every game." His ping in his favorite shooter went from around 30 milliseconds to around 55. He wanted to know whether he had set it up wrong. He had not. He had bought something that, for most people most of the time, does the opposite of what that advert claimed.

That said, "a VPN always makes your ping worse" is not quite true either. There are specific situations where a VPN improves your connection to a game server, sometimes noticeably. The honest answer depends on your internet provider, where the game server is, and where the VPN server is. The good news is that you do not need to guess. You can test it in about half an hour.

What ping actually measures

Ping is the round-trip time for a small packet of data to travel from your device to a server and back, measured in milliseconds. In a game, it is roughly the delay between you pressing a button and the server knowing about it. Under about 40 milliseconds feels instant in most games. Above about 100, you start to notice it in anything fast.

Three things make up most of that number. Distance, because data moves through fiber at roughly two thirds of the speed of light, which works out to around 1 millisecond of round trip for every 100 kilometers of cable. The route, because data rarely travels in a straight line and each hand-off between networks adds a little time. And congestion, because busy equipment on the way makes packets wait in line.

Why a VPN usually adds to it

A VPN sends your traffic to a VPN server first, wrapped in encryption, and only then on to the game. That changes two things.

The encryption itself costs almost nothing on a modern phone or computer, well under a millisecond in my testing. Each packet also gets slightly bigger. With WireGuard, the protocol most good VPNs now default to, the extra is about 60 bytes per packet, which matters very little for game traffic.

The route is what costs you. If the VPN server is not on the natural path between you and the game server, your data takes a detour. That is what happened to my reader. He was in Manchester, the game server was in London, and his VPN app had picked a server in Amsterdam because it was showing the lowest load. His packets were crossing the North Sea twice for no reason.

When a VPN can genuinely help

There are three cases where I have seen a VPN improve a game connection, and they are all about the route rather than the VPN itself.

The first is poor routing by your internet provider. Sometimes a provider sends traffic to a particular game's servers along a strangely long path, because of how its agreements with other networks are set up. A VPN server that has a better connection to that game's data center can shortcut the problem. This is real, but it is specific to particular provider and game combinations, and it can change from month to month.

The second is evening congestion on a particular link. If your provider's route to a game server is overloaded every night between 7 and 11, a VPN that takes a different path may avoid the busy section.

The third is not about ping at all but is worth mentioning. In some older games where players connect directly to each other, other players can see your IP address, and on rare occasions people have used that to flood a player's connection. A VPN hides your real address in those games. Most modern games route through their own servers, so this matters far less than it used to. I covered how games handle location in what server browsers teach about hiding location.

The test

Here is the method I use. It needs no special tools, only the ping display that most online games have somewhere in their settings, often under a network or performance stats option.

• Pick one game and one server region, and stick to them for the whole test.
• Play or idle in a match without the VPN for five minutes and note the ping every minute. Write down the middle value of the five, not the best.
• Note whether it jumps around. A ping that swings between 30 and 90 is worse to play on than a steady 50, even though the average looks similar.
• Connect the VPN to a server in the same city as the game server, or as close as you can get. Repeat the five-minute check.
• Repeat once more with a VPN server in a different city, to see how much the location matters.
• Do the whole thing twice: once in the afternoon and once in your usual evening playing time.

When I ran this from my home for a game hosted in Frankfurt, these were my middle values:

In the afternoon, the VPN only added a few milliseconds at best. In the evening, a well-placed VPN server actually beat my normal connection, because my provider's usual route was congested. The automatic server choice was worst in both cases. Your results will be different, which is the whole point of running it yourself.

If the VPN does not help

Most of the time, the real cause of bad ping sits closer to home. Wi-Fi is the most common culprit. A wired cable to the router fixes more lag than any VPN. The second is a household connection that slows to a crawl whenever someone else starts a large upload or download, because the router lets queues build up. Many speed test sites now show "loaded latency" alongside the normal ping, and if that number is several times your idle ping, the router is the problem, not the route.

For a plain explanation of what a VPN does and does not change, see what a VPN actually does, and for other claims that sound better in adverts than in practice, our list of VPN myths is a useful companion.

Run the test this week, once in the afternoon and once in the evening, for the one game you play most. If the VPN does not beat your normal connection in the evening, you can stop worrying about it for gaming and leave it switched off while you play.