[SOLVED] Does a VPN really degrade gaming?

Apr 28, 2022
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Living in New York City I have a server of my favorite vpn really close to me, connecting to it my overall latency will be just 3ms.
While playing fps games connected over vpn Ive noticed choppiness and “ghost bullets” but how is it possible? I only loose 3ms but I feel like loosing 150ms how so?!??

doing a speed test I get the following results:
  1. Without VPN 1ms ping to closest server
  2. With VPN 5ms ping to closest server
 
Solution
The simple answer is that using a VPN, you'll have more packet overhead because it's an encrypted connection. So even with less latency, you have more packet overhead to move around at that latency.

Latency is simply the time it takes a packet to arrive at it's destination. It doesn't care that some parts of the connection require encryption and decryption.

That said, it's impossible for humans to see a 1ms difference in latency.
Apr 28, 2022
14
0
10
Protonvpn but I’ve tried many even express vpn and I can feel like it adds 100ms, but in fact it adds only 5ms, why? Do you have a technical explanation?
 
First a couple ms makes no difference in most games. They have the games tuned to not allow someone with a fast ping to the server to have a advanatage. Pretty much it will add artificial delay to those that have faster times so more or less everyone is the same. You will still see different ping but what matters is how fast it actually sends the position updates. In general if you have 100ms to the server it will work fine. Sometimes you might find a private server set with faster setting but these are meant for lan usage and do not work well on the internet. In effect they are cheat servers for whoever is running them because they in their house will be the only one getting the fastest time to the server.

You must be measure the numbers wrong. You can't even reliable detect 5ms of difference the tools are not that accurate. You also likely can't get 1ms times unless you live in the data center. Latency to the servers can not exceed the speed of light and the speed going though copper and fiber devices is only a fraction.

In addition vpn should always increase the latency There is a lot of overhead in the encryption that takes time to compute and the you must still go to the vpn data center which for most people is more total distance which will increase the latency.

In the end you are not measuring things correctly if you think you get 3ms to the game server.
 

troyer1234567

Reputable
Dec 31, 2020
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Living in New York City I have a server of my favorite vpn really close to me, connecting to it my overall latency will be just 3ms.
While playing fps games connected over vpn Ive noticed choppiness and “ghost bullets” but how is it possible? I only loose 3ms but I feel like loosing 150ms how so?!??

doing a speed test I get the following results:
  1. Without VPN 1ms ping to closest server
  2. With VPN 5ms ping to closest server
it's not only the ping that affects your game experience, VPNs have another problem which is packet loss, for example you shoot 5 bullets but 3 of them actually shoots due to packet loss, i highly recommend u not to use vpn during games unless you really have to! i prefer using DNS Changers if a game is not available in my region . good luck :)
 
The simple answer is that using a VPN, you'll have more packet overhead because it's an encrypted connection. So even with less latency, you have more packet overhead to move around at that latency.

Latency is simply the time it takes a packet to arrive at it's destination. It doesn't care that some parts of the connection require encryption and decryption.

That said, it's impossible for humans to see a 1ms difference in latency.
 
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Solution

LORYT699

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Apr 6, 2022
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Living in New York City I have a server of my favorite vpn really close to me, connecting to it my overall latency will be just 3ms.
While playing fps games connected over vpn Ive noticed choppiness and “ghost bullets” but how is it possible? I only loose 3ms but I feel like loosing 150ms how so?!??

doing a speed test I get the following results:
  1. Without VPN 1ms ping to closest server
  2. With VPN 5ms ping to closest server
a suggestion for multiplayer games, if is p2p use a vpn, no matter what is not I suggest you to turn it of for that game.
Why on p2p game is better than u use it? simply ddos attack or modders that like to play as fake hakers, if you play gta online is a must to use vpn