For example, if you’re playing a massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) and your character is standing in a major city with hundreds of other characters running around on your screen, you may experience both low FPS and lag. Low FPS and lag sometimes show up at the same time, complicating things.
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To improve lag, try a different server, use Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi, upgrade your networking hardware, or–if you have a particularly slow internet connection–pay for a better package. Lag often refers to the delay caused by consistently high latency (also referred to as high pings), but you can also experience “lag spikes” where everyone else in the game appears to pause in place, followed by their characters teleporting or racing to new locations as the game receives updates. Actions you take in an online game may happen noticeably later – latency is the time it takes for your computer to communicate with the server. When you shoot at someone in an online FPS, you may always miss because your latency is so high that, by the time your shot reaches their place, they’ve long since moved away. If you’re playing a multiplayer game, the game may be completely smooth, but other players may be stuck walking in place or teleporting around. If your game is lagging heavily, your FPS may still be very high. Lag shows up very differently from low FPS.
If you’re far away from the game’s servers – perhaps you’re in Europe playing a game on North American servers – your latency (often referred to as your “ ping” time) may be high. It may be a result of the game’s servers experiencing problems, but it’s also likely that a network problem is occurring somewhere between your computer and the servers. Lag isn’t a result of a problem with your computer it’s a result of a problem with your network. It doesn’t have anything to do with your network connection. In other words, low FPS is a problem with the game’s performance on your computer.
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You may have too much junk software running in the background, competing for resources. Your hard drive may be too slow, causing the game to slow down as it’s forced to read data from your hard drive. You may need a faster graphics card, more RAM, or a better CPU. If you have a low frame rate, that’s not the game experiencing lag – that’s your computer failing to keep up with the game. In less extreme cases, the game will feel jerky and slow – just the opposite of smooth.įrame rate issues aren’t caused by network problems.
If your frame rate is low enough, playing the game may feel like watching a slideshow as only a few different frames appear on your screen per second. Low frames per second (FPS) appear as your entire game behaving slowly.