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Title has it, what is the absolute bottom that my Ping can be while playing Overwatch. Is 20 the minimum as the server is 20ms ahead of anyone (so it actually knows what's going on and can act accordingly) or can I go lower than that (I've never been lower than 19ms by the way)

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    I suppose the lowest would be < 1ms. That's assuming your PC is the server. You can't get any lower than that.
    – Nolonar
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 22:55
  • well the speed of light will place a lower limit on your ping, but we'd have to know where you live to compute it.
    – KutuluMike
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 22:55
  • @Nolonar And since we aren't the server, but rather connect to a server there must be some bottom limit greater than 1, that we can't go bellow.
    – Иво Недев
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 22:59
  • @ИвоНедев if you were sitting nextdoors to blizz's server farm and there wasn't crazy firewalls that slow down everything in the way (how much ping they cost is only known by blizz, they'd need to check the statistics/logs), you'd still get 1ms.
    – ave
    Commented Aug 29, 2016 at 23:17
  • assuming you were the server I'd say the lowest ping would be distance from RAM to CPU/the speed of light which would be on the order of a tenth of a nanosecond. This would just be the propagation delay, there would also be a processing delay.
    – Aequitas
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 9:31

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Theoretically, the lowest your ping could be is the amount of time it takes the signal to go from your computer to the server and back. Let's hand-wave the details and say it goes at the speed of light, since nothing goes faster than that.

Even if your game was right next to the server, as fast as light is, this still wouldn't be zero, but would instead be some tiny fraction of a second (which could be expressed in milliseconds or nanoseconds or whatever). But, if we're rounding to the nearest millisecond, since that's usually how it is displayed, then this tiny number would round to zero.

So, 0ms.

Of course, this isn't practical at all. You're not within inches of the server. The exact practical minimum will depend upon the physical network infrastructure between your game and the server. In other words, it depends on where you live.

Getting a ping under 10ms is pretty unusual. If you're getting under 20ms, you should be quite pleased.

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  • Did you perhaps mean a positive number of seconds instead? Ping can't be negative. It also means that you don't need to mention non-zero.
    – Irregular User
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 0:34
  • Of course and I took this into account before commenting.
    – Irregular User
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 0:38
  • "This would still be non-zero, and would be a real number of seconds". Real numbers include negative numbers. My point is that the part in quotes could be replaced with "This would still be positive" for example.
    – Irregular User
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 0:41
  • I am indeed happier with the edit. It's just that you went out of your way to link the wiki page to what a real number is and hence assume that the reader doesn't know what it is, yet assumed that they know it won't be negative. It seems best to just make a technically correct post and do away with the assumptions.
    – Irregular User
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 0:51
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    True, but maybe I could beat the game before I started playing. I just need to build a computer out of tachyons. I’ll let you know when I’m done... which might be sometime before I start working on it.
    – Lord Harkon
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 0:59

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