What is ping and why does it matter for gaming?

pocket-lint.com:

(Pocket-lint) — When playing multiplayer games it's important to know what your ping is and how it can impact your gaming performance.

Aside from just having a sharp aim and good reflexes, there are a few things that can positively or negatively affect your games and influence whether you win or not. Ping is one of those things. But what is it and what can you do to improve it? Stick with us to find out. 

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When you're playing games, the word «ping» is used to refer to the time it takes for the signal being sent from your gaming PC to be received by the game server you're playing on. 

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Ping is often used interchangeably with «latency» as a way to describe a delay in your character's movement or actions in-game compared to your inputs on your keyboard, mouse or controller. 

Latency is different though, as latency can come in several different forms:

There are various things that can impact latency. We've already written about common causes of PC lag and how to fix them. But you can also reduce latency by changing parts of your gaming PC. If you upgrade your CPU, add more RAM, buy a new GPU or purchase a high-end gaming mouse or keyboard. All these things can help reduce problems with latency, but they won't help with ping. 

That's because ping is what happens after some of these sorts of latency. Once the signal is sent to your PC, it then has to go to the server and back again. You can't do anything with your hardware to make that happen faster. Though you can make your connection more reliable with a wired ethernet connection from your router rather than relying on Wi-Fi.