How to Boost Gaming Performance with a VPN

Online games are becoming extremely competitive these days with millions of players and thousands of streamers training all day long just to beat you. It’s no surprise then that gamers, both casual and professional are always looking for ways to boost their performance.

In this case I’ll be discussing using a VPN for gaming as a tool to boost your performance. You will notice reduced lag, you’ll be able to bypass ISP bandwidth throttling, protect your network, and benefit from other important things. In this article, you will learn how to get the best out of your gaming VPN and significantly boost your performance.

Below are some useful tips on how to get the best out of your gaming VPN and actually boost your performance in multiplayer games.

Use a Paid VPN not a Free VPN

While opting for a free VPN is tempting, those come with limited abilities, such as a fewer choice of locations, frustrating ads, poor security standards, slow bandwidth speed, and server IPs are easily detected and blocked by streaming services, games and other websites. If you are willing to invest enough money in a good gaming PC, router, and other equipment, you will surely be able to dedicate a few dollars a months for a high-quality VPN with 24/7 customer service.

Boosting performance with a VPN

There are different things that you should consider when choosing and setting your VPN for gaming. They include the following:

Choose the Most Optimal VPN Location

Location is very important when it comes to latency and in-game ping. The distance between yourself and a game server can severely impact your lag. Ideally you would want to connect to a VPN server located somewhere between you and the game server in order to avoid unnecessary additional hops which will definitely increase your ping.

That’s precisely why it’s always advised to identify the location of the game server you’re playing on before choosing a VPN server, otherwise you won’t be able to choose the most optimal location.

Bypass ISP Throttling

Throttling is a situation when an Internet service provider decreases the speed of your connection. First of all, you need to have a clear idea of whether you are being throttled or not. The best way to find this out is by checking out your Internet speed with and without a VPN. If you notice some improvements in speed with a VPN, then the chances are that your Internet connection is being throttled by your ISP.

ISPs use this mechanism to limit the amount of traffic you can consume for specific activities like gaming. It’s also applied to other things like torrenting and streaming. VPNs offer a unique solution to this problem, they allow you to bypass your ISPs regular routing path and avoid all their filters. By doing that, you become virtually invisible to your ISP, so they can’t throttle your connection based on traffic type any more.

Utilize VPN Intelligent Routing 

Routing is probably the most impactful factor when it comes to ping and latency. When you send a request to a certain game server and then receive a reply, that message has to go through a specific route to reach it’s destination. Therefore, shorter routes will result in lower ping times.

ISPs don’t usually optimize their routing paths, certainly not for gaming purposes. Which is where a VPN can help, with predefined static routes, it can significantly reduce lag or latency.

Optimize your network and PC for gaming

Other things that will help you improve gaming performance include optimizing your network and PC for gaming.

Network Optimization Tips 

It is essential to optimize your network for high speed/low latency gaming. You do not need to have any special technical knowledge to use our simple tips.

• High Speed Bandwidth Router: When choosing a router, you should always go for the highest bandwidth range available. Some routers can handle bandwidth speeds up to 7,200 Mbps while others max out at 800 Mbps. You definitely need to check your router’s bandwidth speed and upgrade if possible.

• Avoid using WiFi: Using ethernet cables instead of connecting via WiFi is a lot better for gaming. WiFi signals suffer from interference from other wireless devices in your home. Whereas connecting directly via cable avoids the negative impact of noise and jitter on your internet connection.

• Use Dual or Tri-band Routers: With this option, you can get faster speeds with a higher frequency band. You also have the ability to split up your traffic and use a certain frequency channel for regular everyday use while dedicating another channel strictly for gaming.

PC Optimization Tips 

It is also possible to improve gaming performance by working a little bit with your PC. Check out these tips that will help you out with that:

• Upgrade your hardware: While you can run some games by meeting the minimum requirements, it’s certainly not ideal. You won’t be getting a steady framerate and the experience as a whole takes a serious hit. That’s why you should always try to meet or even exceed the recommended requirements to ensure you’re getting the most out of the game.

• Update your drivers: As a general rule, you should always keep your graphics, audio and other drivers up to date. These updates may include security improvements, performance enchanting settings and compatibility fixes.

• Don’t overload your CPU: Most online games today demand a lot of computing power. Try to keep your background apps and processes to a minimum, run only the necessary ones as that will reduce the CPU load and allow your game to use up more recourses.

Boost gaming performance with a VPN – Conclusion

As you can see, there are many things you can do to boost your gaming performance. Opting for the right VPN and using it properly is one of the easiest ways to increase bandwidth speed and get rid of various issues that negatively impact your gaming experience. Finally, you can also optimize your network and PC.