The ping test

The Ping Test page measures how long it takes your PC to reach servers in 15 regions around the world, so you can see which one gives you the lowest latency before you ever join a match. It is a quick, honest snapshot of your connection's geography — no driver, no magic, just real network timing.

What the Ping Test actually does

BRUTAL keeps a fixed list of 15 reference endpoints grouped by continent: ASIA (Mumbai, Hyderabad, Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Bahrain, Hong Kong), EUROPE (Frankfurt, Dublin, London, Stockholm), AMERICAS (Virginia, Oregon, São Paulo) and OCEANIA (Sydney). These are AWS region edges — stable, well-connected landmarks that tell you roughly how far, in milliseconds, each part of the world is from your connection.

For each region BRUTAL opens a TCP connection on port 443 and times how long the handshake takes. We use TCP rather than ICMP ping on purpose: port 443 (HTTPS) is allowed through essentially every firewall and router, so you get a reading even on networks that block ordinary ping. The trade-off is honest — this is connection time, which is a very good proxy for round-trip latency to that region.

These are regional reference points, not the exact server your game uses. They tell you which geographic region is closest in network terms. To measure the real server you are connected to in a live match, use Detect My Match in the Route Analyzer.

How to run it

Open Ping Test from the sidebar. You will see every region listed with an empty bar and a dash (—) where the latency will appear.
Click 🌐 Test All Regions. The button changes to Testing… and each row updates live, one at a time, from top to bottom.
While a region is being measured its number shows testing…; when it finishes you get the latency in milliseconds and a colored bar.
When the whole list is done, a highlighted best server panel appears at the bottom with the lowest-latency region and a reminder to connect to that region in-game.

Reading the colors

BRUTAL color-codes every result so you can scan the list at a glance. The bar fills from 0 to 300 ms:

Accent green — under 50 ms: excellent. Ideal for competitive play.
Cyan — 50 to 99 ms: good. Smooth for almost all games.
Amber — 100 to 199 ms: playable but you may feel it in fast shooters.
Red — 200 ms and up: high latency — expect noticeable lag.
Red “Timeout”: that region did not respond within 3 seconds. It may be genuinely unreachable, or your network blocked the connection.

How to use the results

The practical payoff is server selection. If your game lets you pick a server region (many mobile and PC shooters do), pick the one BRUTAL highlights as fastest. Lower ping means your inputs reach the server sooner and you see other players sooner — that is real, felt responsiveness, not a placebo.

The honest limit: ping is mostly physics and distance. A server in another continent will always be slower than one near you, and no software on your PC can beat the speed of light. What BRUTAL can do is show you the truth so you choose wisely, and surface deeper problems (jitter, packet loss, route bottlenecks) in the Route Analyzer when distance alone does not explain your lag.

Best practice

Run the test on a wired connection when you can — Wi-Fi adds variable delay that muddies the picture.
Close big downloads first, or your numbers will be inflated by your own traffic. To measure lag under load deliberately, use the Bufferbloat test.
Run it more than once at the time of day you actually play — routes and congestion change.

Common issues and troubleshooting

Everything shows Timeout: check that you are online and that a firewall or VPN is not blocking outbound port 443. A restrictive corporate or campus network can block these connections.
Numbers seem higher than expected: you may have a download running, or you are on Wi-Fi. Re-test idle and wired.
A nearby region is slower than a far one: that is a routing problem, not distance. Run the Route Analyzer's Trace Route to find which hop is adding the delay.