Your local network has pretty much 0 affect on your ping times assuming you are not using wireless at any point, which might cause higher latencies. I get sub 1 ms latency up to 4 hops from my PC (pfsense,ISP gateway, .., ..).
I don't agree with this at all. Quality of drivers and makeup of all network hardware from every hop affect your latency.
Only for high bandwidth applications. Games use a few kbps. The latency will not increase beyond 1ms. The worst increase will be from the PC's NIC & drivers. Even then, only high bandwidth will aggravate the latency increase.