Lag can often make or break your gameplay. But once it sets in, what can you do to fix it? Here are a few things you should know and a few suggestions to help you live your best lag-free life.

Fast Facts About Lag

Everyone has experienced lag at some point or another. Whether it’s cost you the win in a video game or not, this phenomenon means something is probably wrong. And you’d be surprised at how fast you notice it, too. While the average lag time on a computer is 0.2 seconds, some gamers will notice a delay as small as 0.05 seconds.

As far as what’s causing your lag, there are three possibilities. It could be that your ethernet cables aren’t functioning properly, your router doesn’t have the capacity you need, or your computer’s ethernet port just isn’t capable of hosting the bandwidth you need.

How Can You Fix Lag?

Fortunately, there are a few easy suggestions that might help you fix your laggy connection. First and foremost, you should adjust one of two settings on your computer: video and audio quality. It could be that your quality settings are just too much for your network to handle.

Next, you should check up on your latency. Keep in mind that any latency under 100ms is acceptable for gaming, but between 20ms and 40 ms is typically ideal.

And if none of that is working out for you, consider that your network might be the problem. If you haven’t changed out your ethernet cables in a while, investing in a new set could be handy. And when you think about the fact that Cat 6a cables can handle twice the bandwidth capacity of their predecessor, Cat 6 cables, upgrading seems like a solid solution.

Don’t let video game lag get you down.