Gaming over a VPN

A VPN usually raises your ping, because your traffic takes an extra stop on its way to the game. It can lower it only when the route your own provider uses to reach the game is a poor one, and nothing here promises it will. This page explains what a VPN does to latency, what a game needs from a connection, which of our measurements speak to it, and how to test your own connection with the VPN off and on.

What a VPN does to ping

Ping is the time, in milliseconds, for a small message to reach another computer and come back. Without a VPN, your traffic goes from you to the game's server. With one, it goes from you to the VPN's server and from there to the game's server, and the reply comes back the same way. That is a longer trip, and a longer trip takes longer, so with a VPN on, ping is usually higher.

A VPN can help in two cases:

A poor route. Your internet provider decides the path your traffic takes. Sometimes that path is long or indirect, and a different route through a VPN's server can be shorter. That depends on your provider, the game's server and the VPN's server, so it can't be known in advance, and for most people it makes no difference.
A blocked game server. If your network or country can't reach a server, a VPN can get you there. It makes the connection possible; it does not make it quick.

A VPN cannot make the game's server closer, fix a weak Wi-Fi signal, or speed up a slow line. Whatever its route, no connection beats the distance to the server.

What a game needs from a connection

Low latency. The shorter the round trip, the sooner what you do reaches the game and what others do reaches you.
Little or no loss. Packets that never arrive have to be guessed or sent again, which shows up as players jumping about or actions that don't register.
A steady connection. Latency that jumps up and down is harder to play on than a higher one that stays the same. The variation is called jitter.
A connection that stays up. A drop in the middle of a match ends it.

What we measure

Every 5 minutes, each of our nodes pings a short test through every tunnel it holds open and records whether the tunnel passed traffic. The tables show two readings that speak to a game:

Latency (Median). The middle of the average round-trip times through the tunnel over the last 24 hours. Lower means quicker to respond.
Uptime. The share of the checks in the last 24 hours in which the tunnel passed traffic.

What these do not tell you. A table's latency is the time from that node to the server, not from you, so it mostly shows how far that node is from the server. It is not your ping in a game. The tables do not show packet loss or jitter, so this page can't tell you which servers lose packets or vary. And we don't measure any game's servers.

Each node has its own table. Pick the node closest to where you are, and compare rows within that one table only. Each link opens a table already sorted. Sorting puts one column in order and nothing else: it is not a ranking.

Asia Residential, home line, testing from Asia: latency, lowest first · uptime, highest first
Asia Data Center, data center line, testing from Asia: latency, lowest first · uptime, highest first
South Africa Residential, home line, testing from South Africa: latency, lowest first · uptime, highest first

Check your own

Only a test from your own connection to your own game can tell you what a VPN does to your ping. It takes a few minutes.

Get an address to test against. Some games show their own ping in the settings or on screen. If yours does, note it and skip the commands. Otherwise use the address of the game's server, or of a server in the same region if the game lists one.
With the VPN off, ping it. In a terminal, on a Mac or Linux, run ping -c 10 <address>. On Windows, run ping -n 10 <address>. Note the average, the lowest and highest times, and the packet loss.
Connect the VPN and run the same command. Use a VPN server near you or near the game's server. Note the same three things.
Compare. Lower, steadier times with no loss mean the VPN helped on that route. Higher times are the usual result. A wide gap between the lowest and the highest is the same unsteadiness a game feels as lag.

Some servers don't answer ping at all, which shows as every packet lost. Then use the game's own ping, or a server in the same region that does answer. Run the test more than once and at different times of day, because the same route can read differently in the evening.

What our data shows

Every node's table is on the results page, with what each column means. Each number has the checks behind it, one click away in its row. See also how the 5-minute check works and the known limits.