Battlefield 3 Mini Tweak Guide for Latency (ping) and more

Let me paint a little picture here - I personally use a speedy fiber Internet connection and typically it is super fast for anything I do. You'd imagine my pain in launching a Battlefield 3 session after waiting patiently to connect to a server nearby with a good ping, only to find when I get in the game, it's lagging almost to an unplayable degree. Alright, it's not like the good old days where you'd see up to and above 500ms latency - but still, it's enough to get your aim and so forth off target and cause some real mouse smashing on the pad. So, I set to finding a solution for the problem - everyone else seems to be fragging nicely, but not me. It turns out that to enable a smooth gaming experience in BF3 on the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 there is a little bit of work to be done. You know EA... it would be nice if you made this a little more public. I suspect it may be because not everyone is affected by the issue and it will depend greatly on your n etwork setup. Anyway, to cut to the chase, it turns out you need to enable certain online ports for BF3 to offer a lag-free gaming experience.

Let's run you through now how to get this done. It's going to involve playing around with your router and opening up ports to your specific PC or console IP addresses that you are using to play BF3. Sounds messy, right? Once you know where to look, it really only takes a few minutes to do. I'd highly recommend you visit portforward.com which provides step-by-step instructions for setting up port forward on many different routers. Read more at TweakTown.