17 ms·
Keyboard latency
- gsich 9y agoHere is a video where someone is testing USB latency, although with USB hubs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbu3ySrRNVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbu3ySrRNVc
- lolc 9y agoBy coincidence I just replaced my last Apple Keyboard with an MS 4000 today. I find it curious that they are both at the top of the list, even though I've never considered hardware latency an issue.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- wwarner 9y agoI've been wondering about this for longer than I care to admit. I always felt the perceived responsiveness of my old sparc 20 was much better than pcs I used 15 years later, and I thought it had to do with keyboard latency and interrupt processing.
- olegkikin 9y agoMeasuring using sound should be more precise. Even a bad mic has orders of magnitude more time resolution than a 240fps camera. Something like click-to-beep.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI find my typing accuracy is affected by keyboard latency. An interesting way to test this would be to use a sensor to note how the point where a key was definitely "headed down" (say > 10% of its total travel) and then waiting for the message to show up. In older keyboards the main CPU was doing some of the debouncing so it knew "right away" that a keyboard was pressed. That cuts down on latency as well. Another test case might be to put a USB -> PS/2 adapter on the keyboard. This lets the onboard CPU know to send the keycode as soon as it has decoded and debounced it.
- latigidigital 9y agoI'd really like to see more research done on this subject. I clock about 15 keystrokes per second while typing full speed, and I find serious issues with accuracy using most contemporary keyboards, even on gaming and higher-end OEM equipment. Edit: Some keyboards are also practically unusable due to dropped inputs above a certain rate.
- kwijibob 9y agoI am a fairly good typist (70WPM+) and I agree with this. When I bought my first chromebook, I opened google docs and found the typing latency terrible. It couldn't keep up with me. Then I let the chrome OS update, and everything was as smooth as butter.
- korethr 9y agoIMO, a better measure would be from activation of the switch, as opposed to the beginning of key travel. I don't start waiting for the character to appear on my screen from the moment I begin to press down. My anticipation begins when I feel the tactile feedback of the switch activating (or the switch bottoming out on switches that don't offer tactile feedback). On a keyboard with good tactile feedback, I might not move the switch through it's full travel -- just a little bit above and below the activation and reset points.
- baxuz 9y agoA weird result with the Das 3 keyboard (25ms) considering it uses a cherry MX switch, same as the Kinesis (55ms). The OLKB and Ergodox don't state the switches used, but it's almost certainly a cherry MX style switch with non-modified actuation points compared to the original.
- pokemongoaway 9y agoWould also like to know more about this since I want the best performance from my Kinesis :)
- mjw1007 9y agoI agree. Presumably he measured it the way he did because it's easier to measure, rather than because he thinks it's the more meaningful way. (Though maybe his way is more useful if he's interested in whether a keyboard gives an advantage in gaming, rather than whether it's pleasant to type with.)
- LoSboccacc 9y agothe article specifically states the reasons for why he messured the whole travel, no guesswork needed > This is because, as a human, you don’t activate the switch, you press the key. A measurement that starts from switch activiation time misses this large component to latency.
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- matthavener 9y agoPS/2 keyboards are used by serious gamers because the scan rate is higher than USB. See https://superuser.com/questions/16893/do-usb-or-ps-2-keyboards-respond-faster https://superuser.com/questions/16893/do-usb-or-ps-2-keyboar...
- gsich 9y agoIsn't PS/2 interrupt based? So there would be no scan rate. Haven't looked at your link though.
- dfox 9y agoThere are two "scan" rates: the rate at whitch keyboard matrix is scanned by whatever electronics is inside keyboard (that is probably independent of the outside interface) and the rate at which the interface is able to process input events, which for PS/2 means faster that the keyboard can produce them (as keyboard is essentially bus master on the AT/PS2 keyboard "bus") and for USB means as fast as the *HCI pools keyboard for interrupt events (old Apple's ADB works the same way and is in fact to some extent inspiration for USB <3.0 and Firewire "one big bus" high level model). Edit: then there is third approach: simple keyboard/input devices with serial interfaces, where host provided clock is used to both clock the interface and keyboard scan logic. In essence the whole keyboard then looks like one big shift register. Keyboards that works this way includes original Macintosh, most Wyse and DEC terminals and MIT/LMI/Symbolics Lisp machines (and probably pre-sun4 Suns, sun4 and later have rs232-derived ionterface), also this is the way how controllers for Nintendo consoles before Wii work (IIRC Nintendo calls that "EXI bus") and how PlayStation 1/2 controllers work. IMHO this is to some extent where the idea behind SPI comes from.
- yathern 9y agoFor what it's worth, that answer is now 8 years old - I'm curious if this has changed since then.
- SebiH 9y agoA more recent video claims that the PS/2 advantages are negligible even for serious gamers (around 3:40) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWkvzycD5PE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWkvzycD5PE
- rbanffy 9y agoOn the debouncing thing, Razer announced one with optical switches instead of electrical.
- enthdegree 9y agoYep, also capacitive and Hall-effect switches don't need debouncing.
- rbanffy 9y agoI think a couple of my Apple II clones had hall-effect keyboards. Too bad their graphics are not very competitive today.
- colanderman 9y agoI'm surprised the "humans don't notice 100 ms" argument is even made. That's trivially debunkable with a simple blind A/B test at the command line using `sleep 0.1` with and without `sleep` aliased to `true`. To my eyes, the delay is obvious at 100 ms, noticeable at 50 ms, barely perceptible at 20 ms, and unnoticeable at 10 ms. Not to mention that 100 ms is musically a 16th note at 150 bpm. Being off by a 16th note even at that speed is – especially for percussive instruments – obvious. On the other hand, if you told me to strike a key less than 100 ms after some visual stimuli, I'm sure I couldn't do it – that's what "reaction time" is.
- AmVess 9y agoYes, and something like a touch interface is very obvious, too. Look at this video on Youtube from Microsoft Applied Sciences Group: High Performance Touch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4 You can plainly see that 100ms is an eternity. While keyboards aren't the same thing, but high latency is noticeable. I had to change a keyboard because of the near eternity of when I pressed a key and when it registered on the screen. The difference between the old and the new is quite stark.
- clebio 9y agoYou realize this video (or a version of it) is linked in the article itself, yeah?
- gregmac 9y agoHm, neat. I notice about the same result -- 0.1 is quite obvious. If you want to blind A/B test yourself, run this: DELAY='0.1'; VALUES=(0 0); VALUES[$((RANDOM % 2))]=$DELAY; alias test_a="sleep ${VALUES[0]}"; alias test_b="sleep ${VALUES[1]}" Adjust DELAY as you want, and then use test_a and test_b and see if you can guess which is which, then run alias to see for sure.
- mistercow 9y agoI was suspicious that there might be some artifacts of terminal updating that are amplifying the effect in that test, so I whipped up a little graphical test: https://jsfiddle.net/zs8bncxj/1/ https://jsfiddle.net/zs8bncxj/1/ I can still get it right pretty much 100% of the time, but the difference does feel a lot more subtle than what I was seeing in iTerm. (If you change the delay, you need to hit randomize to make it take.) Edit: Also we should keep in mind that we're not testing the latency we set in either test. We're testing that delay plus the delay from I/O. So 100ms might be indistinguishable. But by the time we pile everything on, we're getting closer to 200. The result is the same as far as UI design is concerned; don't assume that you can get away with 100ms; most of that leeway has already been wasted by the OS and hardware.
- sgt 9y agoHas anyone benchmarked the keyboard latency of recent generations MacBook Pro Retinas?
- M4v3R 9y agoI don't have a way to measure raw USB events, but it takes around 90 ms between me pressing a key on the Macbook's (2015 model) keyboard and a character showing in the TextEdit.app.
- pokemongoaway 9y agoI would also like to know. And would like to know if any of these keyboards listed have had their latency reduced using any methods.
- rasz 9y agoMacbooks are known to throttle usb polling to something like 32ms toi save battery.
- pdq 9y agoI measured ~62ms for my MBP 2016 in MacOS 10.12.6 using Terminal, with the "Is It Snappy" app.
- Stenzel 9y agoCompare with musical keyboards where not only key number but also the velocity matters, so each key has two electrical contacts, and the whole thing is usually scanned around 10kHz for proper velocity measurement. Although key contacts are arranged in a diode matrix, the latency is usually below 2 ms, even with good old MIDI. So neither the keyboard matrix nor the debouncing justify a latency of 10 ms or above. It is nice to see that latency is an issue in gaming now, similar to realtime audio, where most operating systems are still not very usable - with the exception of OS X.
- xigency 9y agoNow to learn to type with a keyboard... or game I suppose.
- lanius 9y agoNow that would be fun! I think it would be possible to achieve a reasonable typing speed given the right "keyboard layout" (aka the QWERTY equivalent for musical keyboards).
- stevelosh 9y agoHave fun: http://joon.be/portfolio/canabalt-100/ http://joon.be/portfolio/canabalt-100/
- adrianN 9y agoChorded keyboards are a thing aleardy. It should be possible to type quite efficiently using a musical keyboard.
- petepete 9y agoI can't see the merit in that particular test. It's the actuation point that matters. For more depth than anyone really needs, see the r/mechanicalkeyboards wiki https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/switch_guides https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/wiki/switch_gui...
- alasdair_ 9y agoIsn't a big part of the reason "gaming" keyboards cost so much because they can register more than three keys (sometimes four) being hit at the same time - something many cheaper keyboards cannot do due to the way they are wired?
- DeRock 9y agoThis is known as key rollover, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollover_(key) It is a result of the matrix wiring of the keys, though more expensive keyboards will have them wired individually, mitigating this issue.
- munchbunny 9y agoYes, n-key rollover sometimes comes up. In practice, I've only had it become an issue in the wild either when more than one player is sharing the keyboard or, in some rare games, primarily simulators, where you might need to hold multiple keys.
- jdietrich 9y agoIt's a frequent issue in FPS games. Simultaneously pressing four keys isn't particularly unusual in an FPS, but it confounds an awful lot of non-gaming keyboards.
- lelandbatey 9y agoI've had keyboards which where marketed as professional keyboards have very obvious problems with this. Specifically, I had a Logitech MX5500 and if you where holding down the 'D' key and then pressed the 'S' key, the keyboard would never send the 'S' key (though I might remember those keys backwards). This is a problem because many a video game has you use the 'WASD' keys as direction keys to control movement, so trying to move backwards and to the right would fail. So it's not like nobody experiences this problem.
- jetpacktuxedo 9y agoAs mentioned in my other comment, that is a symptom of ghosting, not of being limited to the standard 6-key rollover set by the usb spec.
- rubatuga 9y agoI've done a simple test with my Macbook Air, using the app "Is It Snappy", as mentioned in the comments. I used the keyboard on my macbook, which is a chiclet style mechanism. The tests were all done in triplicate except for TextEdit, (only twice) TextEdit: ~81 ms from key depression to when LCD pixels begin to shift. For Sublime Text: ~86 ms. Both of these text editors are pretty well matched. However, if you boot into Recovery Mode in macOS, you gain access to a GUI without a V-synced/tripled framebuffer. Terminal in Recovery Mode: ~57 ms Finally, the kicker. macOS users have always had access to a terminal interface upon boot called single-user mode: Single User Mode: 37.5ms (all three measurements were the same) If you want to experience what the latency on old computers felt like while typing, simply reboot your mac, and while it's starting up, hold 'Command + S'!
- rasz 9y agotry with charger plugged in, macs throttle polling to save power.
- rubatuga 9y agoThat's only true if your battery is low, and mine was above 80%
- dannyw 9y agoThis is incredible. Single user mode feels like the screen updates BEFORE pressed the keys, like it is time travelling. I guess I've used to the high latency on newer computers.
- akvadrako 9y agoIt actually does seem a little faster, which is sad. I would like to see how much normal userspace can be optimised, and where the delay occurs: 1. between the keyboard and CPU 2. in the input subsystem 3. in the app / system libraries 4. in the display subsystem 5. between the CPU and the screen
- maxymoos 9y agoOr if you're on Linux (Debian/Ubuntu), switch to one of the default virtual terminals with Ctrl-Alt-F1 (and Ctrl-Alt-F7 to switch back to your X server console on my machine) to experience the delight of low latency keyboard-to-screen typing.
- tesseract 9y agoI probably missed something but: > It’s possible to get down to the 50ms range in well optimized games with a fancy gaming setup, and there’s one particularly impressive consumer device that can easily get below that. Is the device in question mentioned anywhere?
- wolf550e 9y agoYes, the apple magic keyboard with 15ms latency.
- tesseract 9y agoOh. I guess I interpreted the passage I quoted as referring to a complete keypress-to-display latency, which wasn't tabulated in the article (vs. keypress-to-USB). And the Apple keyboard isn't that much of an outlier with the next-fastest keyboard coming in at 20ms. So I'm a bit let down but I'll accept it.
- wesleyac 9y agoNot mentioned in the post, but I worked with Dan on this and I'm pretty sure he's talking about the iPad pro.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- microcolonel 9y agoI've been experimenting with alternative protocols to HID. I'm not satisfied with fixed-interval input polling out of sync with vsync; it takes way too many samples to reach the desired latency (and especially jitter!) numbers. As for keyboards, there's no real excuse not to just have a Bigass™ shift register (or a couple) and address every keyswitch with a trace and an interrupt crossbar. There's a limit to how cheap a good-enough keyboard can ultimately be, so a difference of a few cents in BOM and assembly, and slightly more intricate membrane layouts is not worth crying over. The methodology here is broken for non-linear long-travel keyswitches, for which the "point at which the key starts moving" is the wrong point to measure. For example, I'm typing this on buckling-spring keyswitches. The break for these switches is part way down the stroke, this is intentional and does not contribute to "latency", since the intent of depressing the key above the break is not to send the keypress at that moment, but to be ready to cross the break once the previous key has been pressed. This is very similar to how good handgun triggers typically function: a light, firm, and smooth uptake before a break, and hopefully with a reset very near the break. It communicates to the user how close they are to actuating the switch. In the case of linear long-travel switches (i.e. Cherry MX Red style switches), it's harder to decide where to consider the key "pressed", but in the case of non-linear long-travel switches (buckling spring, Cherry MX Blue) it's clear that the break is when the keypress should be registered, not the beginning of the uptake. In the case of non-linear switches, they don't need to bottom out to register keypresses, so they can have exceptionally low latency. With sufficient spring stiffness, and a long enough heel, buckling spring keyswitches should take less time to actuate than scissor-dome switches. Added: Regarding the testing methodology, it seems like you could do better with a combination of a motor, an armature, and a small strain gauge (or a measurement of motor load). The motor will apply consistent force at consistent peak acceleration between tests if you input consistent voltage. For non-linear switches, you can measure the break time as a junction in the applied force across the strain gauge or in the motor load on one of the analog inputs on your logic analyzer; for linear switches, you can measure the start of actuation the same way. Motor load would work just fine, since you're not interested in the exact force exerted, and thus don't need to calibrate for the efficiency of the motor.
- secure 9y agoSuper interesting post, thanks. Do you have any more details on your HID alternative to share? You’ll need a custom USB driver for that, right?
- feelin_googley 9y ago"It all started because I had this feeling that some old computers feel much more responsive than modern machines." s/modern/recent/ "For example, an iMac G4 running macOS 9 or an Apple 2 both feel quicker than my 4.2 GHz Kaby Lake system." Kaby Lake system running OSX? I have one of the last G4 that came with OS9. Based on intuition it would make audio applications "feel" slower, when OSX came out I did not "upgrade", despite the marketing at the time. I guess I am not the only one. "It turns out the machines that feel quick are actually quick, much quicker than my modern computer - computers from the 70s and 80s commonly have keypress-to-screen-update latencies in the 30ms to 50ms range out of the box, whereas modern computers are usually in the 100ms to 200ms range." "... where we are today, where can buy a system with the CPU that gives you the fastest single-threaded performance money can buy and get 6x the latency of a machine from the 70s." Methinks when someone spends that kind of money on a system, they will never accept findings like these. They are not likely to respond "inquisitively" to someone who describes achieving better speeds with a "less powerful" system that costs a fraction of what they paid. More likely, they will try to discredit them.
- digi_owl 9y agoI suspect the culprit is not the hardware, but the software. Back in the day there were very little between the keyboard and the screen, and most of it were either in rom or in ram. Never mind that unless one were dealing with a big iron or similar, multi-tasking was a big nope. These days most OSs have 10s to 100s of processes going right after a first boot on a clean install. And all those can trip something at "random" intervals.
- subwayclub 9y agoJust the other day I replied to a Reddit thread, and told a gamer who experienced periodic frame drops in CS:GO to check the other system processes. He protested that he had nothing else running, but elsewhere in the thread a Task Manager screenshot revealed that Windows 10 Smartscreen Filter was chewing through files and bottlenecking the HDD(a problem I've also experienced). Basically, desktop Windows has crossed the threshold of "needs SSD" to perform adequately. And in theory that shouldn't impact the performance of an older game, but it does, because what happens next is that the scheduler misallocates process time and throws off everything.
- js2 9y agoI think this was posted to HN before, but in any case, related: http://isitsnappy.com/ http://isitsnappy.com/ It's an iOS video app for measuring latency. The page has this about Apple keyboards: "This one’s bizarre: the onboard keyboards on both the 2015 Macbook Pro and Macbook Air have worse latency than an external keyboard. Plugging in an external wireless keyboard improves response latency by 40 ms."
- Dunedan 9y agoThe MacBook Pro 2015 doesn't use an USB connection to connect the internal keyboard when using macOS. Instead it uses SPI. Unlike the newer MacBook Pros it still has the keyboard wired to USB, but doesn't use that because of power saving reasons.
- ddade 9y agoI stopped after I read "Apple 2" for the second time.
- rdl 9y agoHas anyone made the "direct wire to every key" keyboard? Getting rid of debouncing would be kind of cool.
- jotux 9y agoWiring each key to an input would get rid of scanning, not debouncing.
- grantwu 9y agoThis article prompted the following questions for me: 1. How well did the historical systems do, and why? Presumably non-negligible key travel is not a modern invention. 2. How much of the latency is key travel? (i.e. what korethr said) 3. How exactly were the keys pressed/how fast were they pressed? All the article says about the experimental setup is "The start-of-input was measured by pressing two keys at once – one key on the keyboard and a button that was also connected to the logic analyzer."
- digi_owl 9y ago1. i suspect it comes down only a single program having full reign of the system at a time, and everything living in either RAM or ROM (no page faults etc).
- jtl999 9y agoI have something interesting about USB input latency to share. In 2014 I built a new computer with a i5-4590 CPU, ASUS Z97-A motherboard and 8GB of Kingston DDR3-1866 memory. One thing I instantly noticed was that my mouse (Logitech G400) would feel "delayed" compared to my older computer from 2010 (i3-550, Intel DH55HC motherboard). I could have the same OS (tested Win7 and Ubuntu), GPU and monitor between both computers and switch, and the difference was that obvious. Another problem I had was DPC latency under Windows with driver: "usbport.sys". USB audio would drop out in correlation with DPC latency spikes and I believe it was related to the mouse latency. Under Ubuntu I had the same problem and logged a dmesg message that said "retire_capture_urb: x callbacks suppressed", with the same symptoms. I got so frustrated I stopped using the new desktop and went back to my old desktop and a new laptop for about 2 years, after wasting my time running Prime95, MemTest86 for over 24 hours, and swapping the motherboard with another model that let me disable HPET (Supermicro C7Z87-O) In the end, last year I decided to work on it again and swap the memory with some Corsair 2X4GB DDR3-1333 memory and just like that, the DPC lag spikes were gone, USB audio didn't drop out and my mouse stopped lagging.
- greggman 9y agoI'm confused. the first claim is Apple 2 has a fast response The second claim is that key travel matters. Short = faster But Apple 2 keys are not short travel keys
- kazinator 9y agoYou have to look at fingertip travel time, not keycap travel time, for a more complete picture. Those cracker-thin chicklets that comprise the Apple Magic keyboard will only make you faster if you rest your fingertips on the caps. That may not work so well in all games; it depends on the controls. If you rest a finger on a certain key, but a situation requires you to use that finger to react with a different (though near by) key, you're at a disadvantage compared to having the finger raised so that it can strike either key with equal speed.
- ilaksh 9y agoThis great article and the other recent one from him started me down the path of thinking about an end-to-end optimized modern computer and operating environment. If you _could_ (not saying it's easy or even necessarily practical at all) drop replace all of the slow stuff like high-latency keyboards, syscalls, CPU-GPU communication (i.e. effective HSA) and build some proof-of-concept operating environment (that was explicitly incompatible with existing stuff).. I think you could get a pretty fast computer. It would be fun to try. Anyway is there a Cherry MX keyboard that has low travel and low latency overall?
- kentt 9y agoI'm not sure if there's a common switch with less travel, but you could look into using spacer and/or landing pads to accomplish what you're looking for.
- jetpacktuxedo 9y agoNot sure about low latency (especially since this article seems to have failed to test that at all...), but for low-profile cherry-style switches you could look into the new low-profile Kailh switches, which are sort of based on the old Cherry ML switches. The only manufactured board you can buy with these right now is the Havit HV-KB390L[1], as far as I know. If you are really tied to the cherry mx style you could check out the kailh and cherry "speed" switches, which have slightly shorter travel distance and a higher actuation point. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Mechanical-Keyboard-Extra-Thin-Switches-HV-KB390L/dp/B0722GG88M https://www.amazon.com/Mechanical-Keyboard-Extra-Thin-Switch...
- kentt 9y agoMakes me wonder about the latency of bt keyboards as well as my custom made keyboard controller. HHKB JP with Hasu's controller
- fred256 9y agoThe experience of 100 ms latency is definitely noticeable. Ask anyone who's ever ssh'd to a server across a continent or ocean. Empirically, I notice I have a lot more typos in such a situation.
- nikodunk 9y agoI just gotta say I LOVE these un-styled pages. I come across them more and more – a result of us all being sick of bloated web?
- geokon 9y agoYou should try the readability mode in Firefox
- sturmeh 9y agoCompletely missing the fact that enthusiast keyboards still prefer PS/2 for NKRO (no key-rollover) and HW interrupt support which results in sub 10ms delays.
- lightedman 9y agoNot all PS/2 Keyboards had NKRO, sadly. I know this yuck HP media keyboard won't.
- vehementi 9y agoNKRO is N-key rollover, as opposed to 2-key rollover (limited to pressing 2 keys at once) - N meaning any number
- Skunkleton 9y agoOn linux, after keyboard has decided that a key has been pressed, and is ready to tell USB about it. 1. Wait for USB to poll. 2. Handle interrupt urb generated by keyboard. 3. Propagate the urb to the correct driver for completion 4. Create input events for each key event in this urb. Don't forget to use this to add to your randomness pool! 5. Pass the key event to user space, and wake up readers. 6. Some library reads the input event, and calls some sort of handler. 7. Application logic updates the internal state as a result of a key press. 8. Tells some library to redraw. 9. Library redraws, and writes to the X server using x protocol. 10. Magic occurs. I assume this magic is mostly just compositing windows and copying to a frame buffer, but who knows? 11. The magic pixies run across the wire from your PC to your monitor, and at some future date, your monitor displays it. Honestly, I am impressed that all of this gets done in less than 100ms.
- nojvek 9y agoComputers are fast. 100ms is eons for things that just run on CPU. With a 2ghz computer, you can count from 1 to almost a billion. That's a billion little steps that can happen in the blank of an eye.
- Skunkleton 9y agoThe issue is that there are a bunch of steps that are polled (usb), or that require many context switches/interactions with the scheduler. All of this adds significant latency, regardless of the throughput of the CPU.
- whipoodle 9y agoOk, but the point is that it used to take even less time than it does now, and ideally things would get faster as technology advances.
- Skunkleton 9y agoYeah, but there used to be only a few steps to draw a new character, and none of those steps were polled, or dependent on a scheduler.
- snvzz 9y agoIt would be cool to look at Linux vs the BSDs on this. BSDs (dragonfly and openbsd) do feel like they react faster to keyboard input, but I've always wondered whether it's actually faster or just imagined.
- yoginth 9y agowow
- smallstepforman 9y agoThe issue not mentioned in the article is number of lines on the keyboard matrix used to detect keypresses. Cheaper non-gaming keyboards can only detect up to 4 simultaneous keystrokes. Gaming keyboards can detect up to 6. That may not sound like a significant difference, but if you're moving diagonally (eg. W and D), running (Shift), holding an item (or use) (E) and jumping (space), that is 5 keys which need to be processed. Moving from my older Gaming keyboard to a generic Logitec keyboard, and I was no longer able to run diagonally in FIFA games while doing trick moves. So the non gaming keyboard made me stop playing that game.
- some1else 9y agoI'm looking for a low-latency, NKRO, chiclet-style keyboard. Would freak out if it also had individual LED backlights. Build it, and I promise to successfully market it as a musical instrument. P.s.: I currently use external Apple keyboards to perform & make music (with things like http://qwerkey.xyz http://qwerkey.xyz).
- mxstbr 9y ago7 lines of CSS to make this website more readable: body { max-width: 40em; line-height: 1.5; font-size: 18px; margin: 0 auto; font-family: sans-serif; } Copy and paste them into your DevTools and enjoy this great post!
- majewsky 9y agoWhat's it with font-size recommendations getting larger and larger every year? When I started writing CSS for my websites, the standard font-size was 12px (sometimes 10 or 11).
- some1else 9y agoThe dot sizes of screens are decreasing. Also the resolutions were lower, so we had to save space.
- hguhghuff 9y agoSo maybe i could rig up my Apple 2 as a keyboard....
- ksec 9y agoAnd Apple try very hard to optimize input latency on Apple Pencil which i believe the newer version on iPad Pro is now sub 10ms? I think we should have rule on OSX and iOS where this sub 10ms latency is standard.
- Thews 9y agoI'm using a das keyboard 4 on an iMac and did some tests to see what kind of latency different programs had for the cursor moving with just personal observations. iTerm seems to be significantly slower to move the cursor than Chrome or TextEdit. Before seeing this article I've thought that iTerm seemed slow before to show text, it'd be nice to see a writeup on how long it took for text to render after keyboard input on a few different programs to get developers to use the same methods to keep this as quick as possible.
- unwttng 9y agoI feel so vindicated for gaming with an Apple keyboard on my Windows PC cus it was the only thing I had hanging around
- oskenso 9y agoSo.. I noticed the huge latency difference between (Alt+Ctrl+F1) tty1 and Gnome with X11. After some tests using "Is it snappy?" app and my das keyboard I decided to check if Wayland had similar latency problems. After switching to Wayland I cut 40ms off my keyboard latency.. hmm. I don't know why that is but I assume there's some sort of frame buffer latency. The only thing I miss now is Plank :[