Due to their plug and play nature people often don’t bother setting up their internet connection properly on consoles, and this often results in lower performance compared to what they could achieve. Today Reddit user RemoteSenses posted a handy little suggestion on how to set your nameservers on PS4, which depending on your location could lead to a sensible improvement in the quality of your tethering to the world wide web.
First of all download Google’s Namebench on any PC and run it (try not to have any other download going on as you do, as it could throw the results off). It will benchmark all the available nameservers and find the ones that are fastest for you.
Once you’re done testing, write down the two fastest nameservers (marked Primary and Secondary on the top right of the web page that will be opened automatically, as you can see above) and open the settings menu of your PS4, then follow the steps below:
Go to “Network”
Go to “Set up Internet Connection”
Select “Use Wi-Fi” or “Use a LAN Cable” depending on whether you’re connected on wireless or via ethernet cable.
Select “Custom”
Select “Automatic”
Select “Do Not Specify”
Select “Manual”
Insert the two numbers you got before as your “Primary DNS” and “Secondary DNS” (don’t use those in the picture above, as they’re specific for me and showcased just as an example)
Select “Automatic”
Select “Do Not Use”
The method works for Xbox One as well, even if the procedure is slightly different, go to Settings and follow the steps below:
Go to “Network”
Go to”Advanced Settings”
Go to “DNS Settings”
Select “Manual”
Insert your numbers as primary and secondary DNS
Unless your automatic settings are already optimal (which can happen, but it isn’t always the case), your performance should increase. By how much depends on how badly optimized your automatic settings are, and it depends on a large variety of factors including your location, your provider and several others.
It’s worth mentioning that the quality of connection to nameservers varies over time, so you may want to actually repeat the process periodically. The method works on any other connected device as well, but of course each will have its own specific menu structure.
