(Image credit: Future)

I've always been an advocate of keeping your personal data as private as you can to stave off the creeping hand of digital tyranny, but for gaming? Nah, no chance. I'm a (wannabe) competitive gamer and I need my latency as low as possible, and VPNs are a no-go. At least, that's what I thought until I actually tried a bunch of them out for an extended period.

During my testing of the best VPNs for gaming , I was surprised to find that—at least with some of them, in my location—it wasn't a case of making the best of a bad situation. In fact, in some cases my ping actually dropped lower than without a VPN on.

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VPN performance comparison

Local ping (Counter-Strike 2)

0 3.75 7.5 11.25 15

Ping (ms)

Local ping (Counter-Strike 2) Data Product Value

No VPN 12.58

NordVPN 12.73

Windscribe 12.34

Surfshark 13.54

Mullvad 12.55

Proton 13.8

ExpressVPN 12.22

Average ping in CS2 Deathmatch games in the same country (UK) and connected to the same game server, with…