i’m not too tech-savvy about networking
Ping-reducing VPNs can help, but only for a small fraction of users who have particularly bad routing through their ISP. Most of their customers see only a marginal benefit or none at all.
I’d recommend getting some kind of free trial if available. Measure lag in-game both with and without the VPN. Be sure to measure this yourself in-game; don’t trust whatever metrics are built in to the VPN. Also I would only bother with one of them if I were you … you either have bad routing from your ISP or you don’t.
Generally these services require an agent to run on your PC and don’t work for console at all. You might find integration in a few gaming routers for them, but I don’t think this is too common. Also note that these service can *only* improve routing through the internet. They can’t help with ping spikes caused by Wi-Fi, for example. (If you care about ping, you need to be wired but that’s another discussion.)
Regarding your second question, sorry I don’t quite understand it. Are you asking whether you can take a portable hotspot and put a router on the LAN side, so that multiple devices can share the hotspot? Yes, but if you are gaming over a hotspot then your latency will be uniformly terrible and no VPN in the world will help you.
ping reducing vpns do not exist. if they claim they have an improvement, it’s a complete lie.
if you are trying to keep your ping as low as possible on a mobile hotspot, using it without a portable router will save 1 or 2 ms maybe but the best way to reduce ping is to switch to a fibre connection
Think of it like driving somewhere and hitting traffic. Will using a different route affect your ETA? Even if the route is shorter or not affected by the traffic, it may be a dirt road, so it actually takes longer. Also, if everyone starts taking the detour, it can get just as congested and more than the original route.
it only worked for me in one game and it’s guilty gear strive, yes I got a worse ping but the game servers are trash and I’m positive that they are locked by timezones i haven’t found a way go get around it so i just gave up and got exit lag.
It works only specific circumstances where your Internet provider might have a terrible routing, i’m playing war thunder and CS2 and i tried using one of the services you mentioned and it did improve my ping by 10-30ms and reduced packet loss.
It somewhat works. It’s dependent on the game though. For an FPS for example, you may not see any difference at times. However, if you were to play an mmorpg, then of the mmorpgs I’ve played, I can say it definitely works. It may seem small, but it makes your skill rotations and depending on the game, weapon swapping far better.
The rotation difference can be the difference between dying or not dying. In one game I use, it completely removes the laggy delay between swapping pets and charging skills. Which makes a massive difference in high end content.
People only talk ping but dont talk about packet loss or disconnects which most VPN providers offer a load balancing service.
small fraction of users who have particularly bad routing through their ISP.
This disproportionally affects people using crappy budget ISPs
In theory i do agree but using VPN to actually fix route issues from ISP’s it does work if we strictly speak about gaming.
I use exitlag because sometimes routes from ISP to the gameserver is fudged up. between 70ms vs 20ms id rather have the 20ms with better routes using the vpn.
from someone who travels alot, i promise you it works xD
Eh, they kinda do and don’t. I haven’t looked into them in the past 10 years or so, but as I remember they were doing some “route optimization”. Less hops you go through, less latency in theory.
However, it’s highly dependent on stuff like your connection to the VPN.
which FPS have you tested it with - Halo MCC?