• Networking

  • What is Jitter and how does it affect gaming?

Salutations geeks,

I always run ping-tests and I get latency of around 50 with a packet loss of 0% but my Jitter is always 40-45MS; what does that mean and will it affect my gaming majorly? (Haven't gamed on this new connection because I need a bit of time before I get my setup complete)

Thank you.
Packet jitter is expressed as an average of the deviation from the network mean latency.
Not as bad as packet loss :P but still not so very enjoyable. Usually appears during peak times, from 6 - 8 pm till 12pm 1am
a month later
Jitter is the variation of delay/latency.

Let's say your ping is a stable 100ms, that means your jitter is zero. But if one ping is 70ms, the other 130ms, your jitter would be 50ms.

Now its effect: let's say you're having a voice convo. That means packets can arrive out of order. Having a voice convo with 1s delay and zero jitter means you'll hear your interlocutor 1s later, which is not great but ok because the speech will still be audible. Let's say the average delay is 1s and the jitter 1s too, that means packets can reach completely out of order and you'll have squeaking sound (zi2 zi2) while the VoIP app tries its best to reorder.
Same applies to a certain extent with gaming.
Worth noting that jitter increases processing because of packet reordering on TCP and some sensitive UDP streams.