Latency and online games

Latency can be known as ping. Try to play servers that are near to you. Might ask your friend to host a server and try to connect to them and see your ping is.

no matter what hype you read, 99.99% of the time, the ONLY thing that you can affect through changing settings/etc will optimize is your ping to your first hop. Unless you find a solution to speed up the routers on the internet, they treat packets on first-come-first-serve basis.

If you have general lag issues, do "tracert www.google.com" and see your ping from each router between you and google. "Generally" your first few hops are sub 50ms as they're still within your ISP and not out on the rest of the net yet.

Like someone else posted, your your biggest(most likely) issues would be either another computer on your home network hogging bandwidth and/or other programs on your computer. Programs on your computer can interfere in one of two ways: #1. hogging bandwidth #2. bad firewalls/virus scanner being bad at scanning your data packets.

If you have any issues with other computers/programs eating bandwidth, a slightly expensive way to help is to get one of those "gaming" routers that Dlink and others have. What they do is prioritize small packets. Generally video games don't need a lot of bandwidth, but they need low latency. So games typically use small ~900byte packets. Bulk transfers like downloading or P2P use large packets ~1500bytes which helps overall bandwidth. These "gaming" routers prioritize the smaller packets. Since lag is mostly caused by having a queue of packets in front of your packets, by putting the smaller packet up front of the queue removes virtually all locally generated lag.