This is one of the questions we get most, and it usually comes with the wrong expectation: that a “gaming DNS” will bring your ping down. It won’t, and knowing why saves you from trying ten addresses blind.
Where DNS comes in when you play
DNS turns names into IP addresses. Your console or PC uses it whenever the game needs to find something by name: the login server, matchmaking, the store, the patch server. Each of those lookups takes anywhere from 5 to 100 milliseconds depending on the resolver you’ve configured, and a lot of them run back to back at startup.
But as soon as the game knows the IP of the match server, it talks to it directly. Match packets go by IP, never through DNS. The ping you see on screen measures that path, and that path doesn’t change no matter which resolver you pick.
So DNS affects what happens before the match (menus, login, queue, downloads), not what happens during it.
What you do notice with a better DNS
- Snappier menus and login. A modern game makes dozens of DNS lookups on startup. If your resolver takes 80 ms instead of 10, that adds up to seconds you can feel.
- Downloads from the right node. Patches come from a CDN, and the CDN assigns you a node based on where it thinks you are. A distant resolver can get you sent to a distant node and a slower download. A resolver with a node near you, or one that passes your subnet to the CDN (that’s what ECS does), avoids the detour.
- Fewer odd failures. Some ISP resolvers respond poorly under load or over-cache, and that shows up as “could not connect to server” for no visible reason.
What DNS won’t fix
If your problem is high ping or lag, the fixes are elsewhere:
- Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. It’s the biggest improvement you can make without spending money.
- Picking the closest server region inside the game.
- Not playing through a VPN, which adds a hop.
- Prioritising the console in your router (QoS) if other people at home share the connection.
Which DNS to pick for gaming
Two criteria: it answers fast from your network, and it doesn’t filter.
The first one is measured, not guessed. The big resolvers are anycast, meaning they answer from the node closest to whoever’s asking, and the closest node depends on your city and your ISP. The DNS speed test runs five rounds of queries from your browser and ranks the resolvers by real latency. Run it on the same network you play on.
The second one matters more than it looks. Resolvers with ad blocking or parental controls use lists that sometimes include telemetry or authentication domains games rely on. The symptom is a login that won’t go through or a store that won’t load, and nobody suspects the DNS. For a console, prefer an unfiltered resolver or one that only blocks malware.
With those two criteria, the usual candidates:
| Resolver | Primary | Secondary | Filtering |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | 1.1.1.1 | 1.0.0.1 | None |
| 8.8.8.8 | 8.8.4.4 | None | |
| Quad9 | 9.9.9.9 | 149.112.112.112 | Malware only |
| DNS4EU | 86.54.11.100 | 86.54.11.200 | None (“unfiltered” variant) |
In our measurement from Madrid, Cloudflare and DNS4EU answer in 5 or 6 milliseconds. From another city the order may change, which is why we keep saying: measure.
Setting it on a console
PS5 and Xbox let you set DNS manually in the console’s network settings: primary and secondary, IPv4. The secondary is a fallback, not load balancing, so put the one that came out fastest in the test first.
If you’d rather change it once for the whole house, do it on the router: how to set DNS on your router. For PC there are guides for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Games blocked by your ISP
Some people searching for “DNS for gaming” are really trying to get past an ISP block on a game or its launcher. When the block is applied at the ISP’s DNS, which is the most common approach, a public resolver resolves the name and the game connects. When the block is by IP, DNS won’t get around it and you need something else. It’s quick to tell apart: if the name resolves with 1.1.1.1 but the connection still won’t go through, the block isn’t in DNS.