What is a good ping for gaming?

Ping is latency — how long it takes data to travel from your device to a server and back. For gaming, what matters most is stable low latency, especially loaded latency (how ping behaves when someone is downloading or uploading).

Ping targets (general)

• 0–20 ms: excellent
• 20–40 ms: very good
• 40–70 ms: playable for most games
• 70–100 ms: noticeable delay
• 100+ ms: laggy; competitive games suffer

Jitter and packet loss are deal breakers

Even with a decent average ping:

• high jitter causes inconsistent movement and hit registration
• packet loss causes rubber-banding and stutter

Idle vs loaded latency

If your ping is fine when idle but spikes during downloads/uploads, you likely have bufferbloat. A router with smart queue management (SQM/QoS) can dramatically improve this.