3 ms·

In competitive play it makes a big difference. Each frame of a 60Hz game spans 16.66ms, while in a 30Hz game it's 33.33ms. Depending on how well the engine is

by chipsy 16y ago

In competitive play it makes a big difference. Each frame of a 60Hz game spans 16.66ms, while in a 30Hz game it's 33.33ms. Depending on how well the engine is coded, there will be at least one frame of latency between input and reactions, and maybe more. So we could be looking at the difference between 33 and 66 milliseconds of input latency, at least. This doesn't even consider latency from input to the computer, or from the computer to the display. Now consider that we react to events within about 200-300ms. 66ms of latency on top is going slow things down considerably, and when games are poorly coded and dump a few additional frames on top - which could happen because of propagation through events and subsystems, network latency, or animation concerns - the control starts to feel "wrong" in a hard-to-identify way.

barrettcolin 16y ago
Digital Foundry has a series of interesting articles about measuring input lag in console games; I think this is the first: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-factor-article http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-factor-...
- qrybam 16y ago
  Interesting article. I'm not much of a console gamer (not much of a gamer anymore in general) but those figures are horrifying for a PC gamer to look at! 100-150ms lag (not counting any network lag on-top) would be pretty hard to swallow for me, but I'm biased and have a bit of a purest view on these things. I guess the most important thing is that you have fun - in which case, if the game achieves this but lags a bit, who cares?
qrybam 16y ago
Agreed on it making a difference in competitive play. Though 200-300ms is a pretty slow response time (especially in a competitive environment - depends on the game I suppose). In most twitchy games (actually in most games) people's reactions would be in the 20-100ms range. One of the interesting things that can happen if you v-sync a game that's capped to 60FPS on a screen which has a refresh rate that is not a multiple of 60 (e.g. 70 or 100, etc) is the addition of mouse lag to the game (there's an added delay between moving the mouse and actually seeing the action happen on the screen).

by chipsy 16y ago

barrettcolin 16y ago

Digital Foundry has a series of interesting articles about measuring input lag in console games; I think this is the first: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-factor-article http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-lag-factor-...

qrybam 16y ago
Interesting article. I'm not much of a console gamer (not much of a gamer anymore in general) but those figures are horrifying for a PC gamer to look at! 100-150ms lag (not counting any network lag on-top) would be pretty hard to swallow for me, but I'm biased and have a bit of a purest view on these things. I guess the most important thing is that you have fun - in which case, if the game achieves this but lags a bit, who cares?

qrybam 16y ago

Agreed on it making a difference in competitive play. Though 200-300ms is a pretty slow response time (especially in a competitive environment - depends on the game I suppose). In most twitchy games (actually in most games) people's reactions would be in the 20-100ms range. One of the interesting things that can happen if you v-sync a game that's capped to 60FPS on a screen which has a refresh rate that is not a multiple of 60 (e.g. 70 or 100, etc) is the addition of mouse lag to the game (there's an added delay between moving the mouse and actually seeing the action happen on the screen).