Ping & Jitter Grader
Grade your connection for competitive play. Enter ping, jitter and packet loss and get a per-genre verdict plus the specific thing to fix first.
Ping
Acceptable
Good under 35 ms for this genre
Jitter
Acceptable
Good under 5 ms
Packet loss
Good
Anything above 1% is a fault
Your ping is fine, but it is unstable
Jitter of 6 ms means your latency is swinging around rather than sitting still, and the game cannot predict for it. This feels worse than a consistently higher ping. Usual causes: Wi-Fi interference, another device streaming or backing up, or a router with a badly-tuned QoS feature. Wired connection and pausing background uploads fix most cases.
Three numbers, and only one of them is famous
Everyone talks about ping. Almost nobody talks about jitter and packet loss, which is unfortunate, because those two explain most of the moments where the game feels wrong despite a respectable latency number.
Ping
Round-trip time to the server. It is mostly a function of physical distance and how efficiently your traffic is routed, which means your ability to change it is limited. Picking the correct server region is the single biggest lever you have — bigger than any router setting.
Jitter
How much your ping varies from moment to moment. Netcode is built to compensate for latency it can predict; jitter is unpredictable by definition. This is why a stable 80 ms connection frequently feels better than one averaging 40 ms with spikes to 120.
Jitter is also the most fixable of the three. It is usually caused by Wi-Fi interference, a device saturating your upload, or a router applying traffic shaping. Plugging in an Ethernet cable resolves a large share of cases outright.
Packet loss
Data that never arrives. This is the one that produces the truly maddening moments — the shot that clearly connected but did nothing, the teleport back three metres. Losing packets means losing game state, and there is no setting that compensates. Anything above 1% on a wired connection is a genuine fault worth escalating to your ISP.
What to fix, in order
- Get on Ethernet, even temporarily. It resolves the majority of jitter and loss problems and takes five minutes to test.
- Check what else is on your network. A single cloud backup or 4K stream can wreck a connection that tests perfectly when idle.
- Turn off router “gaming mode” and QoS. These features reshape UDP traffic and cause exactly the problems they claim to solve on a surprising number of consumer routers.
- Verify your server region. Games occasionally pin you to a distant data centre after a patch and never tell you.
- Drop the VPN. If you are running one, it is a latency cost you are paying voluntarily.
Common questions
What is a good ping for gaming?+
Under 35 ms is excellent for a tactical shooter and effectively invisible. Under 60 ms is fine for almost everything competitive. Between 60 and 100 ms you will lose some peeker’s-advantage duels but the game is entirely playable. Above 150 ms, prediction starts breaking down visibly in fast games, though MMOs and turn-based titles stay perfectly comfortable.
Is jitter worse than high ping?+
Usually yes. A steady 90 ms is something the netcode can compensate for consistently. A ping bouncing between 30 and 90 ms cannot be predicted, so your character rubber-bands and shots that looked good do not register. If you have to choose, take stable-and-higher over low-and-erratic every time.
How much packet loss is acceptable?+
Effectively zero. Under 0.1% you will never notice. At 1% you get occasional missed inputs. Above 2% the game becomes genuinely unpleasant and no setting will fix it, because information is being destroyed in transit rather than merely delayed.
Will a gaming VPN lower my ping?+
Almost never, despite the marketing. A VPN adds a hop, and adding hops adds latency. The single exception is when your ISP routes traffic to a particular game badly — some do take absurd paths to specific data centres — and a VPN happens to take a shorter route. That is a narrow case worth testing, not a general solution.
How do I measure jitter?+
Run ping -n 100 8.8.8.8 in Command Prompt and look at the spread between the minimum and maximum round-trip times. A tight cluster means low jitter. Most in-game network overlays also report it directly, which is more relevant since it measures the path to the actual game server.
All calculations run locally in your browser.
More tools