Online Gaming: Playability Score

The OPScore, or Online Playability Score, is a benchmark that measures game lag under network stress; therefore, the OPScore tool is a good way to measure the quality of your network for online gaming. The OPScore test can be run from any Windows PC with an Internet connection.

To run the actual test, you need access to the Internet. The test is located at: http://streamengine.ubicom.com/html/lower.cfm?
page=test_your_network.playability_score

The following chart is a sample test report.

The OPScore test includes two parts:

1. The first part, the Internet Connection OPScore, measures game lag without any background data transfers to load the network. This tests the quality of your Internet connection itself.
2. The second part, Quality of Service (QoS) OPScore, measures the ability of the network to prevent game lag even when there is other traffic present on the network. The tool uses background data transfers to load the network during the QoS OPScore stage of the test.

Explanation of scores:

OPScore: HIGHER IS BETTER. Overall score as calculated by OPScore Test.

Latency: LOWER IS BETTER. Latency is the delay that characterizes the network impairment that affects online game playing. It is the average amount of time necessary to transmit information about a player's actions from the application layer from one player to another.

Jitter: LOWER IS BETTER. Jitter is the variance of latency.

Packet Loss: LOWER IS BETTER. Packet Loss is the percentage of bytes lost during online game playing.

Network Gaming Quality Test

1. What do the results mean?

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2. What is OPScore?  

OPScore, or Online Playability Score, describes the perceived network quality for online gaming.  The OPScore is a benchmark that measures game lag under network stress; therefore, the OPScore tool is a good way to measure the quality of your network for online gaming.  The tool measures the amount of time it takes data to travel from the home computer to the test server and if any packets have been lost along the way.

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3. How is OPSCore Calculated?  

The gaming quality test measures the condition of your network under these conditions.  This model uses measurements of delay, jitter, and packet loss on the network to predict network quality. 

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4. How do I set up my router and PC for the test?  

Routers that feature StreamEngine technology are already designed to identify and prioritize network traffic without configuration.  StreamEngine will also treat background traffic, such as that used in the test, with a low priority.  This detection process is not port based.  However, most QoS engines use a port-based prioritization scheme.  The test uses different ports for specific traffic types.  If your home router does not use StreamEngine, you should configure the following priority levels.

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