Introduction

When you play games, two indicators directly influence the smoothness of your experience: FPS and ping. These two concepts are often mistakenly used by gamers to talk about their performance, when in fact they are two different aspects.

What are FPS ?

➜ FPS stands for frames per second, which indicates the smoothness of the game's display.

Your gameplay is simply a series of static images that play one after another. FPS (frames per second) represents the rate at which your computer generates and displays new images on the screen. The higher the FPS, the smoother the game appears visually, and conversely, a drop in FPS causes stuttering, slowdowns, and graphical lag. For a decent experience, 30fps is sufficient, and 60fps will make your game even smoother and more enjoyable.

The number of game images generated per second is defined by:

• Graphics card (GPU) power (and/or processor (CPU) power if you don't have one)
• Game graphics settings (the more detailed the rendering, the longer it takes to calculate an image)
• System heat and overall performance (use of graphics hardware by other processes)

[!TIP] Optimize your FPS by lowering your in-game graphics settings and updating your graphics card drivers. On Chrome and potentially other browsers, enable hardware acceleration if it's disabled.

What is ping ?

➜ Ping is network latency. It measures the communication delay between your device and the game server.

Ping (expressed in milliseconds) measures the time it takes for information to travel from your machine to the game server and back. A low ping (20–60 ms) allows for near-instantaneous interactions with other players. A high ping (150 ms or more) causes delays in certain actions. For example, with a ping of 200 ms, there will be a delay of approximately 0.2 seconds between a player's damage dealt, their death, or their position being registered on screen. This can cause some visual glitches; you might die even while you were in cover behind a wall.

This network latency depends on:

• The quality and stability of the Internet connection (do a speedtest to find out)
• The distance to the server hosting the game - repuls.io offers several servers, in North America (Chicago), Asia (Hong Kong) and Europe (Falkenstein in Germany)
• Network load, VPN usage, etc.

[!TIP] Reduce your ping by using an Ethernet connection, and choose a game server closer to your region.