Good ping, in ranges
| Ping | Rating | What it is like |
|---|---|---|
| 0 to 20 ms | Excellent | Indistinguishable from local. Fibre near a city usually lands here. |
| 20 to 50 ms | Good | Great for every kind of game, including competitive shooters. |
| 50 to 100 ms | Fine | Good for most games and all calls. Top-level shooter players notice it. |
| 100 to 150 ms | Playable | Visible delay in fast games. Calls still feel natural. |
| 150 to 300 ms | Poor | Laggy games; people start to talk over each other on calls. |
| Over 300 ms | Bad | Most real-time apps struggle. |
Why your game shows a different ping
A ping number only means something with a destination attached. The ping test on this site measures the round trip to the nearest Cloudflare edge, usually in your own city or region, which is close to the best your connection can possibly do. A game shows your ping to its server, which may be in another country. Light in fibre travels about 200 km per millisecond, so every 1,000 km between you and the server adds roughly 10 ms of round trip before any router has done anything.
That gives you a useful comparison. If the test shows 15 ms and your game shows 25 ms, your connection is excellent and the server is nearby. If the test shows 15 ms and the game shows 140 ms, the server is far away or the route to it is poor, and nothing at home will change that. If the test itself shows 90 ms, your own line is the bottleneck, and the fixes in how to lower your ping apply.
Good ping by connection type
What is achievable depends on the line. Fibre typically reaches the nearest edge in 2 to 15 ms, cable in 10 to 30 ms, DSL in 15 to 45 ms, and 4G or 5G mobile in 25 to 70 ms. Low-orbit satellite such as Starlink usually sits between 25 and 60 ms, while geostationary satellite services cannot go below about 550 ms because of the distance to the satellite. A "good ping" for a DSL line is a different number from a good ping for fibre, and comparing yourself with a friend on a different technology is not a fair test.
Good ping is also steady ping
A steady 60 ms feels better than a ping that swings between 20 and 100 ms, even though the average is the same. Games can compensate for a stable delay by predicting where things will be; they cannot predict a delay that keeps changing. That variation is called jitter, and it is covered in what is jitter. When you read a ping test, look at the gap between the lowest ping and the 95th percentile, not only at the average.
Good ping for different games
- Competitive shooters (Valorant, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty): under 40 ms is ideal, under 80 ms is fine for most players.
- Battle royale and sports games: under 60 ms is comfortable.
- MMOs and strategy games: under 100 ms is fine; many are playable at 150 ms.
- Turn-based and card games: almost any ping works.
- Cloud gaming (GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud): under 40 ms to the service, because every input makes a round trip before you see the result.