18 ms·

Computer input latency from 1977-2017 (2017)

454 points by thesephist 6y ago

Jonnax 6y ago
Anyone that has used a 120Hz+ display will immediately notice that everything feels more responsive even with simple things like moving your mouse and scrolling. I also find the responsiveness noticeable when typing. You'll be able to tell that the text appears faster on the screen. I wouldn't say it's a requirement. But it does make the user experience nicer.
- nsxwolf 6y ago
  But the text isn't making it from your keyboard through the machine and to the monitor any faster. Seems like at 120hz you're just maybe going to catch it a frame earlier when it shows up.
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    I guess so, the difference between 8ms vs 16ms is not much for 1 frame. Though in my totally subjective experience it feels better. Interestingly the person who did this latency test also did a keyboard latency test: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ Compared to the slowest keyboard measured it's possible to shave 45ms which if you were latency sensitive would be the biggest reduction.
    - dsissitka 6y ago
      > A major source of latency is key travel time. It’s not a coincidence that the quickest keyboard measured also has the shortest key travel distance by a large margin. ... Note that, unlike the other measurement I was able to find online, this measurement was from the start of the keypress instead of the switch activation. That's disappointing. He isn't measuring latency nearly as much as he's measuring point of actuation.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Well, thats a reasonable point of reference: for a user, his starting point is clicking the button, the rest is not under his control
        fomine3 6y ago
        Personally I don't think start clicking as click action is done. If I want to minimumize the gap, I'll use speed switches or thin keyboards.
        dsissitka 6y ago
        I don't think it is. With a clicky switch I expect it to actuate when I hear it. With a tactile switch I expect it to actuate when I feel it. With a linear switch it depends on the switch. You can get linear switches that actuate as soon as you'd like. The more I think about this the more useless it seems. Several of the keyboards he tested come with your choice of switch, different switches with different actuation points, and so you can't just say Keyboard X has a latency of Y without mentioning what switch you were using if you're going to measure from the beginning of the keypress.
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    It is, because there may be multiple things synchronizing their inputs and outputs to the refresh, which causes the refresh-related latency to be a number of frames. E.g. in some Linux compositors inputs are latched with the refresh, apps themselves may render in sync, and the compositor also draws in sync; the GPU driver would also introduce at least a frame of latency typically. Another factor is that some (many?) 60 Hz displays buffer a whole frame themselves, and often don't have quick response times. If you go from a 10 ms response time IPS screen with a frame buffer to a 120 Hz gaming screen with 2-3 ms response time, you already got a difference of about 25 ms just in the screen itself. 8 ms is hard to notice. 50 ms less so. The difference is pretty huge, even on systems that are much better tuned than Linux desktops (e.g. Windows 10). That being said, while it is very nice and feels nice, it's not necessary for development work; I spend most of my days developing on a system over a VNC connection through a VPN, so the basic input lag of that setup is around 200-300 ms. Gnarly yes, but not particularly bad for text input. You get used to just do everything very slowly with the mouse.
    - 1996 6y ago
      > The difference is pretty huge, even on systems that are much better tuned than Linux desktops (e.g. Windows 10). What would you suggest, or either Windows 10 or Linux, to get the lowest latency in a terminal?
      - toast0 6y ago
        If you want the lowest latency in a terminal, use a vga textmode console with a ps/2 keyboard. That's pretty hard to get on windows 10, so I'd go with Linux.
        copperx 6y ago
        I agree. Make sure it's not a framebuffer, because it also adds latency.
        1996 6y ago
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    yes, shaving ~8ms
  - hmage 6y ago
    In the article: > We get a 90 ms improvement from going from 24 Hz to 165 Hz. As per the linked article, the observed delay improvement isn't one frame, more like ~3 frames. It doesn't go up from 1/24 to 1/165, it goes from 2.5/24 to 2.5/165. Computer software waits a lot more than it did in 1977. That's why 240hz displays feel much more snappier even if it's supposed to be less noticeable -- you're waiting for same 3 frames, but they pass by much faster.
- westwing 6y ago
  Scrolling, yes. Mouse, absolutely. Typing? Not really. I have tested this side-by-side.
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    You may not notice, that doesn't mean nobody does. Also it can depend on your operating system. Windows 10 (maybe everything now?) forces you to be in vsync, so increasing refresh rate has a non trivial improvement on the # of ms for a keypress response. Now whether you will notice that can depend what environment you are in. If your editor already has an input latency of 100ms then shaving 8 off probably is not noticeable. But going from 20 to 12 might be.
    - westwing 6y ago
      On Windows 10, and I have tested various text input boxes. There's no way latency is anywhere near 100ms, I would notice that. Generally, from the tests I've seen, input latency is 30-40ms on a wired keyboard on Windows.
      - VRay 6y ago
        you can just point a phone camera at the keyboard and screen, record a video clip, blow it up into stills with ffmpeg, and then count frames Even at 60fps, you should be able to see the difference between 30ms and 100ms. Newer phone cameras often have a "slow motion" mode that'll give you 120+ fps video, too SOME people can see the difference between 30ms and 100ms, but it's almost impossible to actually see it. You'll mostly end up feeling that everything sucks and not knowing how or why.
    - folmar 6y ago
      Definitely not everything. Non-compositing window managers on Linux (non-wayland of course) work in the old way.
- api 6y ago
  Some recent PC/laptop displays can do 100hz and I even feel a difference between that and the long-standard 60hz. It's a small effect but it's noticeable and it looks a bit smoother and better.
- corytheboyd 6y ago
  Maybe there is something there about IDE hints and whatnot too rendering faster, but those are usually bottlenecked by some async background work (language servers, linters, etc.) anyway which would negate the benefit of the screen refresh rate being faster
- m45t3r 6y ago
  Yeah, this is my favorite gimmick of my Samsung Galaxy S20. 120Hz display+240Hz touch sensor makes everything feels so fast and responsive, this is the first Android device that feels faster than my iPad.
  - andai 6y ago
    Does a 240hz sensor help when the display responds at half that rate? I guess it's because the latencies stack on top of each other?
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      It's quite common for the touch panel to run at 2x the display refresh rate. Eg, 120hz touch panels have been quite common for years on phones despite the 60hz disply. It helps both slightly with latency directly, but it also gives you more points to sample from for input prediction which then helps with latency even more. Or for things like drawing applications it'll give you smoother curves assuming the drawing app looks at all intermediate touch samples.
  - setpatchaddress 6y ago
    out of curiosity, which iPad?
    - m45t3r 6y ago
      It on iPad 6. I think if I had an iPad Pro (that also has a 120Hz screen I think?) it would be the same.
- bonoboTP 6y ago
  And on the other side: I very much notice the difference between a corded mouse and a Bluetooth mouse (not a cheap one). It's not unusable, but frustrating enough that I prefer the corded ones. And I'm not a gamer, just doing office stuff, browsing and programming.
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    If you haven't already, get a high refresh rate monitor and a 1000 reports/sec "gaming" mouse. The Razer Viper Mini is light, which adds to the feeling of responsiveness. I've bought a couple for other people and they love them. I recently got a 165 Hz monitor for my decade-old PC (Sandy Bridge era) and with my (now old) G302 mouse, it's like having a new, much faster PC.
  - ragnese 6y ago
    Wireless devices are still hit-or-miss for me. I've also found that my wireless keyboard and mouse actually perform worse if I have WiFi enabled. -_-
    - cozzyd 6y ago
      Are you using 2.4 GHz wifi?
      - ragnese 6y ago
        Yes. This is at my office, so I'm assuming there's good reason for 2.4 GHz. Maybe just range?
        cozzyd 6y ago
        Bluetooth is pretty close in frequency to 2.4 GHz wifi, so could imagine some interference there!
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    I have tried like 5 Bluetooth mice, since BL4.0 the latency has improved from 'terrible' to 'tolerable'. It might be something to do with the windows bluetooth stack, as i noticed the respobce was more sluggish during high CPU use, while USB mice seem unaffected. The same logitech mouse performs much faster through their universal wireless adapter than trhough bluetooth (it has 2 modes), they also have lightspeed adapter, but I haven't noticed much difference.
- rsanheim 6y ago
  Now if only someone made a 34” ultra wide with 120Hz+. In particular one with 5120 x 2160 resolution. Maybe in 2022 at the rate high hertz monitors are coming for non-gaming uses...
  - ezluckyfree 6y ago
    I agree. I'd rather hi-dpi 32"+ monitors first though. Hidpi displays are becoming standard on top-end laptops but on desktop you're almost out of luck. It's wild that the only hidpi 32" monitor is ~$5000, and it was released a few years ago now. My eyeballs need that sweet crisp text.
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      What are you calling "hi-dpi"? There's a ton of 4k monitors in the 27" to 32" range, which are definitely higher DPI than typical. And for a lot less than $5000.
      - ezluckyfree 6y ago
        I'm typing this on a 4k, 32" monitor, which is 137.68 DPI, but I also have a Dell XPS 15, which is 4K and 15", 293.72 DPI, and the difference in sharpness is astounding. The other problem with hidpi scaling (200%) at 4k 32", is that everything is huge, and you lose a lot of screen real estate. Honestly I think 8k 36" is the sweet spot.
        turtlebits 6y ago
        I have the same displays as you- Dell 4k @ 15" and currently using a 32" 4k (I sit 2ft away from it). I also have a Macbook Pro 16 (3072×1920). I honestly don't see a substantial difference between any of them, and I'm generally pretty picky about resolution.
        ezluckyfree 6y ago
        Right but if you scale the 32" so you get the hidpi sharpness (and put it far away), you lose the real-estate that you could have on a 32" screen.
- randogogogo 6y ago
  This is also can be enhanced by tweaking up your mouse sample rates and whatnot. I used to do a lot of setting PS/2 mouse sample rates at 80Hz or more in late 90s that made Windows machines feel almost as nice to use as a Mac.
  - 0-_-0 6y ago
    Isn't PS/2 interrupt based, therefore instantaneous? I think USB has 125 Hz polling rate by default which can be increased to 1000 Hz.
    - tuatoru 6y ago
      From Wikipedia: - > The interface has two main signal lines, Data and Clock. ... To transmit a byte, the device simply outputs a serial frame of data (including 8 bits of data and a parity bit) on the Data line serially as it toggles the Clock line once for each bit. Increasing the clock rate absolutely does reduce latency on a PS/2 port. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port
- 867-5309 6y ago
  the rate of persistence of the human eye is around 25Hz, hence PAL and NTSC framerates. the upper bound for those hypersensitive is around 50Hz, hence the later generation monitors. anything above this is nothing more than marketing hype. it seeming smoother is merely a placebo to justify the extra cost
  - sirsar 6y ago
    Are you claiming humans would fail an ABX test between a 60Hz and a 120Hz monitor? That sounds like a pretty extraordinary claim.
  - genericone 6y ago
    So does it seem smoother or does it not? I definitely notice the difference with 60fps video and 120Hz+ monitors. Additionally, another thing I've noticed in the last decade is the very badly PWM-frequency-tuned LED headlights on some cars. Those engineers selected the wrong LED brightness and tuned it to terrible frequencies which leave flicker-trails when you look at or away from them. Get those PWM frequencies above 500Hz please! Especially get above 200Hz with your LED frequencies at the very least.
  - outworlder 6y ago
    This is not correct. Let's not dispute and go with your claim of 25Hz. Even then, the problem is that eyes don't work like cameras or monitors. Our eyes don't work with "frames". Each receptor updates on its own time. It's easy to see that, if the updates are staggered, multiple sensors could perceive higher frame-rates, even if they can't individually. However, there's another angle to this. Disregarding input lag, which is a very real phenomenon and is greatly shortened by higher refresh, higher refresh rate monitors are able to show more 'discrete' steps for anything that's in motion. Our eyes (and brains) perceive this as movement 'smoothness', even if they can't quite make out every single frame that's displayed. You should try that yourself. Do a blind test.
  - yathern 6y ago
    This is very incorrect. With video, every person can tell the difference between 30hz and 60hz, if they at least know what to look for. The easiest way to show this is by wiggling your mouse around quickly on a computer screen. At 30hz - you'll see the mouse teleporting around - hopping from spot to spot, but not moving. For example, if you stare in the middle, and jerk the mouse quickly to the right, you'll see the 4 or 5 spots where it rendered. With 60hz, you'll see the 9 or 10 spots - and have a stronger illusion of movement. With 120hz, it might even look as smooth as a real object flying across your screen.
- Baeocystin 6y ago
  I bought a 165Hz gsync screen years ago for gaming. I bought all of my other high-refresh screens because wow computing feels so much better in the day-to-day desktop because of it! Not joking in the least.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    My brother swears by his 140hz display, I have used it for a bit and came away feeling underwhelmed - I prefer my 4K 10bit 60hz display
    - Baeocystin 6y ago
      I can understand if you need the pixels and bit depth for color work. I just work with sRGB, and the panel I have is fine for that. I really do like the speed, though.
wojtczyk 6y ago
I love this. Thanks for sharing your measurements!
maxekman 6y ago
Wonderful article! Thanks!
nsxwolf 6y ago
I'm surprised the Apple 2e's is so high, given the seemingly simplistic nature of the machine. I'm also surprised the TI-99/4A's isn't higher, given how complex it is - with its BASIC interpreter implemented on top of a virtual machine.
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  Probably just the nature of the sort of chips you could buy at the time and their scan rates and debounce circuitry. As time marches on we have added a lot of abstraction into the mix. One thing I used to do to make old DOS computers 'feel faster' was to turn up the keyboard rates in the BIOS.
- isolli 6y ago
  In hindsight, it validates the extremely expensive purchase my father made 35 years ago ;) I loved that computer!
- colanderman 6y ago
  TI's throughput certainly was slower. It's been a few decades, but I'm pretty sure it was possible to type faster than the interpreter could keep up. (As a point of reference, listing a program was unbearably slow on the TI, and unreadably fast on the //e.) I suspect it's just that input processing is so cheap on those early architectures, that latency is really dominated by hardware constraints and not by CPU (however slow it might be). Certainly, on the //e, I'm pretty sure the input routine did little more than copy the character to the input buffer and the screen buffer and advance the cursor. The TI's probably was not much more complicated, despite being implemented in bytecode.
buildbot 6y ago
In the appendix they mention something interesting - that apples CPU performance advantage isn’t magic, but very careful planning and testing on the right things, namely the entire App Store’s contents. That’s a huge dataset of real world applications you can test your designs against.
gswdh 6y ago
I wished computer/OS makers would consider this more. Frankly, I don’t see why this isn’t in the region of one refresh rate period of the display.
faeyanpiraat 6y ago
I’ve recently upgraded from a gtx550ti (~10 y.o.) card to an RX 570 (3 y.o.), and even though I get way more performance, it introduced a noticeable inputlag in csgo. It just doesnt feel right, and slowmo video capture confirms it.
- lifeformed 6y ago
  Did vsync get turned on somehow?
  - jessermeyer 6y ago
    Additionally, the input lag may have been there all along but was not perceivable due to low performance.
    - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
      No I've done the same slowmo recording test, and it was not there. Also V-Sync is off now. AMD even has an "anti lag" feature which apparently does nothing. Edit: I have a Ryzen CPU, I've expected the full AMD system to work together better.
      - jessermeyer 6y ago
        Interesting. To be clear, the only change was the GFX card (and driver)?
        faeyanpiraat 6y ago
        There is a minimal chance that I might have used the VGA port on my monitor, and now I'm using DVI. I'm like 80% confident I've used DVI in the previous setup, but there still is a chance that I'm wrong. I'll probably try getting a dvi->vga converter in the next couple of days and see if this is the culprit.
        6y ago
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
This is interesting but perhaps shows that keyboard/screen latency isn't as important as it once was. Just about every application on Apple 2e relied on keypresses being shown on the screen. Modern devices and operating systems are displaying 'windows', streaming 3d graphics etc. and running a myriad of other services at the same time.
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  Sure, the computer is doing a lot more. Apps are still responding to key presses or mouse clicks though. Fortnite, AutoCad or Excel: I press a button I want to see the effect. Increasing delay strictly reduces your ability to control the system via feedback. Even in a mostly passive app like a video player, it sucks if the play/pause button has a long-delayed effect. The tendency is to press the button over and over and feel correctly that we have lost control of the app.
- tyu2 6y ago
  Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing, do we have high speed games today as we used to, e.g. [1]? If game developers assume shitty hardware and software, they won't make things that require better latency. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1TDNliM99U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1TDNliM99U
  - qayxc 6y ago
    First of all, Quake III was released in 1999 - that's way after the low-latency days already. Secondly, not every PC in 1999 was capable of even running QIII (let alone at a high frame rate). During the days of true low-latency gaming, actual game frame rates were in the low 20s and even consoles rarely achieved 50 or 60 fps.
    - tyu2 6y ago
      The link was to an OSP Tourney Q3A mod playing Clan Arena mode, which was released later and became popular even later with better hardware available (another competitive mod was CPMA). You are right on one thing though, default configuration was in 20s of fps on a typical machine of the time and was in fact unplayable, so people had to configure game graphics to simplify it a lot to get high enough framerate, it was basically doom-like looking graphics, no effects, no textures, no shadows, etc. If a game was playable at 20s of fps, I don't think it deserves a title of low-latency gaming.
macjohnmcc 6y ago
I feel the latency when connecting over a VPN to a remote computer and using RDP to a computer on that network. It is not a pleasant experience.
- hedora 6y ago
  Latency to “the cloud” is 10-20ms for most people in the US. (Assuming they’re connecting directly to the closest regional data center.)
  - acdha 6y ago
    Your assumption is very optimistic for a number of people: a generation of security policy wanted everything routed through central monitoring points so you get home network -> vpn -> corporate data center -> remote server and back, all in the hope that the monitoring system would see malicious traffic (since attackers know how to use encryption & obfuscation, this is usually easily bypassed).
- matsemann 6y ago
  A few years ago I had work on a thin-client for a client. After a while I didn't notice, I think my brain just got slower, heh.
angrygoat 6y ago
This reminds me of graphing calculators in the late 90s when I was at school. I initially had a HP, but it took what felt like 500ms to respond when I pressed a key. I switched to a TI-83 and it was chalk and cheese - instant response; you could even write programs in assembly. There was a small cottage industry of traded programs for it.
- clankyclanker 6y ago
  It's still there! https://ticalc.org/ https://ticalc.org/
- wtallis 6y ago
  HP's early graphing calculators definitely had very high latency. But they dealt with it properly, which PC's don't. An HP-48 series calculator will buffer dozens of keypresses, and handle them in-order as if the UI had been instantly responsive. So you don't actually have to wait for a menu or dialog box to be drawn to the screen—if you've learned the necessary input sequence to perform the task you want, you can enter it at full speed. The keyboards were also very high quality with great tactile feedback, so you didn't need visual feedback on the screen to know your key press had been registered.
  - randogogogo 6y ago
    I'd pile on that the programmability of the HPs was amazing compared to the TIs. The manual for my HP-48sx was a chonkyboi but man could I do so much with it. Once I figured out how to calculate pitch frequencies for equal temperament (just a mathematical series) I was using the BEEP function (IIRC) to have my calculator play music.
  - ptx 6y ago
    PCs used to do this, before GUIs got all asynchronous on us. Try it with the old-old-old-old-style start menu (the one from NT 4 and 5).
  - snvzz 6y ago
    I own both hp50g and some TI calcs (86/89). I'd describe hp and ti as laggy and slick, respectively. The 50g is what I used in university, but now I seldom touch it as the 86/89 are so much more pleasant to use.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mdoms 6y ago
I love the new Windows Terminal (wt.exe) but this is one area where they really messed up. The latency between a keypress and a character appearing on screen makes the whole thing feel like a cheap experience. I have no idea what's causing the latency. I suspect there some very big fancy rendering pipeline occurring, because when I open Windows Terminal I get the nVidia overlay popup which normally only comes up when I launch games, indicating the terminal is using a GPU-based rendering engine. Which I'm sure confers some interesting benefits, but it's a heavy price to pay when, at the end of the day, it's just a terminal.
- emteycz 6y ago
  Aren't games normally known for extremely low latencies?
  - mdoms 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm far from an expert on rendering and latency, but presumably game developers put a ton of effort into ensuring that the pixels are pushed with as little input latency as possible. This may not have been a priority for Microsoft in their terminal.
    - zeusk 6y ago
      The whole Terminal code is open source https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/src/renderer/dx/DxRenderer.cpp#L1077 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/src/renderer... The first comment in this function (DxEngine::StartPaint), for example: // If retro terminal effects are on, we must invalidate everything for them to draw correctly. // Yes, this will further impact the performance of retro terminal effects. // But we're talking about running the entire display pipeline through a shader for // cosmetic effect, so performance isn't likely the top concern with this feature.
      - mdoms 6y ago
        Nice find!
dredmorbius 6y ago
Discussed at the time, 162 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407
x87678r 6y ago
Now do WFH with remote desktop that is on a shared VM a few states away with a bunch of other devs. Its horrible.
- locusofself 6y ago
  All my coworkers remote desktop into their workstations at the office from a laptop at home to do dev work. I can't do it. vscode remote development extension has been my savior when I need to code locally and then flip over to RDP to run the deployment from a specific environment (the office)
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    The workflow requires RDP? That sucks. Should build some command line equivalent.
    - dspillett 6y ago
      The dev desktops in the office are a controlled environment that can be locked down. We need that as we work in closely regulated industries handling potentially sensitive data. At least until we arrange for everyone to have company provided dedicated work laptops which we can (mostly) lock down to the satisfaction of our clients and their auditors, but the switch to mostly remote working this year happened at roughly the same time as budgets were squeezed a bit (bet you can guess why!) so that hasn't happened across the board yet. Allowing RDP from non-secured devices "for the time being" is iffy, but we are getting away with it due to the circumstances.
- zwieback 6y ago
  I have a project right now where I have to connect to a VPN, then remote-desktop to a "jumper PC" that's dual-homed via VNC to a segregated PC running Windows XP on a manufacturing tool we recently got out of mothball to backfill Covid supply chain gaps. On the plus side - the ancient version of Visual Studio on that tool is surprisingly snappy!
- randogogogo 6y ago
Jipazgqmnm 6y ago
Did you wiggle the mouse while measuring? ;)
fmakunbound 6y ago
If you're typing into a Slack window, I think you can multiply all that by 10.
- bob1029 6y ago
  Modern software is such garbage. We could make slack feel as good as counterstrike WRT input latency if we really cared hard enough about the end user experience. Unfortunately, chasing shiny (laggy) technologies is way more popular and marketable.
- WillYouFinish 6y ago
  Yes! Slack, Teams, Discord, Spotify. All of these are horrible. I hate to use them. Good thing is I only have to use one of them. I wish there was more modern low latency software.
- bentcorner 6y ago
  Check out ripcord: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ I haven't used it with slack but it works just fine with discord. You don't get voice noise cancellation with ripcord but you don't need that if you use rtxvoice anyway.
- xxpor 6y ago
  i don't even bother editing my dumb typos because the latency of just hitting up + e has to be over 750 ms. Complete garbage.
- jb_s 6y ago
  Electron is the new Flash. Bloat and lag. Using it is understandable as a tactical choice when it's expensive to maintain separate native apps everywhere but man, Slack is a 25 billion dollar company - surely they can write some native apps? Same deal or worse with Teams, the performance of which is goddamn execrable. My laptop is an awful 2012 thing but it shouldn't take 5 seconds to switch between chats.
- markdog12 6y ago
  Happens all the time: https://mobile.twitter.com/programmer_just/status/1253098759266893827 https://mobile.twitter.com/programmer_just/status/1253098759...
Reason077 6y ago
It would be interesting to measure input latency on the new M1 Macs and add them to the table. It certainly feels like they’ve managed to claw a bit back.
utopcell 6y ago
Regarding monitors, OLEDs have a much faster response compared to LCDs. See this [1] for an example. As of why keyboard scanning has become so abysmally slow, it's beyond me. You'd think that this would be a solved problem even for cheap wired keyboards. [1] https://youtu.be/x9n8Hz_RLqw https://youtu.be/x9n8Hz_RLqw
Retr0spectrum 6y ago
> Although we don’t have enough data to really tell why the blackberry q10 is unusually quick for a non-Apple device, one plausible guess is that it’s helped by having actual buttons, which are easier to implement with low latency than a touchscreen. The Blackberry q10 runs Blackberry OS 10, which is based on QNX, which has a realtime microkernel.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I use both Microsoft Office 97 and LibreOffice for writing. The former runs on virtualized Windows Me. The latter runs "native". Keypress responsiveness when typing is night and day, and given where I'm posting this comment, you can guess who has the advantage. Platform: GNU(Linux)Mint Xfce
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  I can't guess
  - kangalioo 6y ago
    Microsoft Office 97 most probably
  - gorgoiler 6y ago
    The hint is in the configuration. The Windows setup is convoluted, awkward, and weird sounding compared to the native app. They are using it for a reason though: it’s much much more responsive than native Linux LibreOffice.
    - forgotmypw17 6y ago
      It's a bit weird, I guess, but it's hardly convoluted or awkward. I downloaded a pre-baked iso for the os, another one for the office, and in about 10 minutes had a working, tolerable writing environment.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    i'm sorry, have you seen someone about that?
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  Open Office feels a bit faster than Libre Office.
- userbinator 6y ago
  The former runs on virtualized Windows Me ...which is, like the rest of the DOS-based Windows from Windows/386 onwards, itself a sort of hypervisor architecture --- DOS applications effectively run in VMs thanks to V86 mode, giving native performance. The difference is very noticeable if you open something like MS-DOS EDIT on Win9x vs. NT 4/2K/XP --- the latter runs in an emulated environment and the latency is enormous.
tenaciousDaniel 6y ago
At least I know I'm not wearing nostalgia goggles when I remember my early days on my Windows 95, and how fast the input responses were. It definitely feels as if input latency has degraded.
- qayxc 6y ago
  It definitely has - PS/2 is interrupt driven, while USB requires polling. This alone introduces enough lag to be felt during normal use.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    The difference is big enough that people have hacked the drivers to let you overclock mouses: https://github.com/LordOfMice/hidusbf https://github.com/LordOfMice/hidusbf
kdrag0n 6y ago
It's worth noting that it's still possible to achieve low latency with modern hardware and even software to some extent, even with all the input filtering on touchscreens. The modern GPU rendering stack won't be able to do it, but I was able to do it in software without giving up the Linux kernel, IRQs, or the input stack. My experiment got down to ~10 ms average tap latency on a 60 Hz phone with a touchscreen scanning at 240 Hz: https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1291213993219039232 https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1291213993219039232 Source code: https://github.com/kdrag0n/touchpaint https://github.com/kdrag0n/touchpaint I have to say that writing on phones really feels much more interactive and natural when the latency is so low. I don't personally feel like these ranges of latency are that big of a deal on desktop computers where input is indirect, but it feels much more significant on phones where your interactions are right underneath your finger.
- nomel 6y ago
  The newest Apple Pencil is apparently around 9ms [1]. It really does fool your brain into thinking something is coming out of the tip. [1] https://www.macworld.com/article/3402336/apple-pencil-changes-and-improvements-in-ipados-13.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3402336/apple-pencil-change...
  - sneak 6y ago
    If only they cared about such things for Terminal.app, so we didn't have the extra step of installing Alacritty on every single machine to improve the situation (and not to anywhere near 9ms, even).
    - sushisource 6y ago
      I've always found this a bit funny - why are people so concerned with input latency at the terminal? (I get why I care with a phone, or gaming). It's not like anyone's typing hundreds of characters a second. I use Alacritty, but mostly because I like the way it's config file works and it does nice font rendering. The latency thing barely even registers.
vehemenz 6y ago
I would love for CRT monitors to make a comeback. Sure, they are less portable and difficult to manufacture/repair. But their combination of refresh rate (without blur), image quality, and color reproduction are still second to none. Considering the price of an nVidia 3080, which is standard PC gaming equipment, there must be a market for high end screens for gamers.
- ddingus 6y ago
  And it could be streamlined. No need for a bazillion types. Color and raster flexibility are the two bright spots for me. Glowing phosphors in tubes is just a great tech.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  Until relatively recently I'd have agreed but at this point I'd take a modern display over a CRT assuming we're talking about high end. Popular options in the high end are displays like the LG 48 CX or some of the "G-Sync Ultimate" monitors like the Predator x27. These kinds of displays start at prices higher than a 3080 though so you don't hear about the market as much since people usually expect to spend less on a monitor than a GPU and the 3080 is generally consider the top of most high end price ranges.
- fctorial 6y ago
  I too like the feeling of xrays shooting into my eyes point blank for 12 hrs every day.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    Electrons
    - tosseuthansia 6y ago
      tens of kilovolt electrons decelerating in a short distance? There'll be x-rays. However, CRTs used leaded glass to block (most) of it.
- 6y ago
jfax 6y ago
I once got so frustrated with the typing latency of editing a Confluence page that I remarked to my coworkers that the "baud rate is unacceptable".
gorgoiler 6y ago
Please please please point me to instructions on how to build a low latency PC. I crave some good old fashioned responsive computing, but moreover I want to fill my classroom with these devices and show a new generation that, to borrow a catchphrase from a far more noble cause, it gets better.
mcguire 6y ago
Huh. I don't remember the Palm Pilot being noticeably slow.
testxyz 6y ago
Test
doggydogs94 6y ago
I remember writing code on a pdp-8 where we had to write code to display the character which was typed.
markc 6y ago
Back in the day (early 80's) I remember using a VAX 780 @ 1 MIPS via time-sharing with 60 other simultaneous users. Editing with EDT felt quite snappy. Amazing.
coldtea 6y ago
One thing I haven't seen is how does the M1 fare in terms of input latency (e.g. in text editors, like in those old tests done with vim, sublime, intellij, etc: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/). I have a hunch it eliminates some...
desmap 6y ago
FWIW, why the Windows Terminal is so responsive from its collaborator: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327#issuecomment-447391705 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327#issuecommen... This was posted here few times but it's still an interesting read in this context.
krige 6y ago
Too bad the author (perhaps strategically) dodged the two seminal for their era microcomputer braches, the 16-bit Ataris and the Amigas. I once read that properly written Amiga software achieved around 16ms latency and would like to see that verified or debunked.

454 points by thesephist 6y ago

Anyone that has used a 120Hz+ display will immediately notice that everything feels more responsive even with simple things like moving your mouse and scrolling. I also find the responsiveness noticeable when typing. You'll be able to tell that the text appears faster on the screen. I wouldn't say it's a requirement. But it does make the user experience nicer.

nsxwolf 6y ago
But the text isn't making it from your keyboard through the machine and to the monitor any faster. Seems like at 120hz you're just maybe going to catch it a frame earlier when it shows up.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  I guess so, the difference between 8ms vs 16ms is not much for 1 frame. Though in my totally subjective experience it feels better. Interestingly the person who did this latency test also did a keyboard latency test: https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ Compared to the slowest keyboard measured it's possible to shave 45ms which if you were latency sensitive would be the biggest reduction.
  - dsissitka 6y ago
    > A major source of latency is key travel time. It’s not a coincidence that the quickest keyboard measured also has the shortest key travel distance by a large margin. ... Note that, unlike the other measurement I was able to find online, this measurement was from the start of the keypress instead of the switch activation. That's disappointing. He isn't measuring latency nearly as much as he's measuring point of actuation.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Well, thats a reasonable point of reference: for a user, his starting point is clicking the button, the rest is not under his control
      - fomine3 6y ago
        Personally I don't think start clicking as click action is done. If I want to minimumize the gap, I'll use speed switches or thin keyboards.
      - dsissitka 6y ago
        I don't think it is. With a clicky switch I expect it to actuate when I hear it. With a tactile switch I expect it to actuate when I feel it. With a linear switch it depends on the switch. You can get linear switches that actuate as soon as you'd like. The more I think about this the more useless it seems. Several of the keyboards he tested come with your choice of switch, different switches with different actuation points, and so you can't just say Keyboard X has a latency of Y without mentioning what switch you were using if you're going to measure from the beginning of the keypress.
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  It is, because there may be multiple things synchronizing their inputs and outputs to the refresh, which causes the refresh-related latency to be a number of frames. E.g. in some Linux compositors inputs are latched with the refresh, apps themselves may render in sync, and the compositor also draws in sync; the GPU driver would also introduce at least a frame of latency typically. Another factor is that some (many?) 60 Hz displays buffer a whole frame themselves, and often don't have quick response times. If you go from a 10 ms response time IPS screen with a frame buffer to a 120 Hz gaming screen with 2-3 ms response time, you already got a difference of about 25 ms just in the screen itself. 8 ms is hard to notice. 50 ms less so. The difference is pretty huge, even on systems that are much better tuned than Linux desktops (e.g. Windows 10). That being said, while it is very nice and feels nice, it's not necessary for development work; I spend most of my days developing on a system over a VNC connection through a VPN, so the basic input lag of that setup is around 200-300 ms. Gnarly yes, but not particularly bad for text input. You get used to just do everything very slowly with the mouse.
  - 1996 6y ago
    > The difference is pretty huge, even on systems that are much better tuned than Linux desktops (e.g. Windows 10). What would you suggest, or either Windows 10 or Linux, to get the lowest latency in a terminal?
    - toast0 6y ago
      If you want the lowest latency in a terminal, use a vga textmode console with a ps/2 keyboard. That's pretty hard to get on windows 10, so I'd go with Linux.
      - copperx 6y ago
        I agree. Make sure it's not a framebuffer, because it also adds latency.
        1996 6y ago
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  yes, shaving ~8ms
- hmage 6y ago
  In the article: > We get a 90 ms improvement from going from 24 Hz to 165 Hz. As per the linked article, the observed delay improvement isn't one frame, more like ~3 frames. It doesn't go up from 1/24 to 1/165, it goes from 2.5/24 to 2.5/165. Computer software waits a lot more than it did in 1977. That's why 240hz displays feel much more snappier even if it's supposed to be less noticeable -- you're waiting for same 3 frames, but they pass by much faster.
westwing 6y ago
Scrolling, yes. Mouse, absolutely. Typing? Not really. I have tested this side-by-side.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  You may not notice, that doesn't mean nobody does. Also it can depend on your operating system. Windows 10 (maybe everything now?) forces you to be in vsync, so increasing refresh rate has a non trivial improvement on the # of ms for a keypress response. Now whether you will notice that can depend what environment you are in. If your editor already has an input latency of 100ms then shaving 8 off probably is not noticeable. But going from 20 to 12 might be.
  - westwing 6y ago
    On Windows 10, and I have tested various text input boxes. There's no way latency is anywhere near 100ms, I would notice that. Generally, from the tests I've seen, input latency is 30-40ms on a wired keyboard on Windows.
    - VRay 6y ago
      you can just point a phone camera at the keyboard and screen, record a video clip, blow it up into stills with ffmpeg, and then count frames Even at 60fps, you should be able to see the difference between 30ms and 100ms. Newer phone cameras often have a "slow motion" mode that'll give you 120+ fps video, too SOME people can see the difference between 30ms and 100ms, but it's almost impossible to actually see it. You'll mostly end up feeling that everything sucks and not knowing how or why.
  - folmar 6y ago
    Definitely not everything. Non-compositing window managers on Linux (non-wayland of course) work in the old way.
api 6y ago
Some recent PC/laptop displays can do 100hz and I even feel a difference between that and the long-standard 60hz. It's a small effect but it's noticeable and it looks a bit smoother and better.
corytheboyd 6y ago
Maybe there is something there about IDE hints and whatnot too rendering faster, but those are usually bottlenecked by some async background work (language servers, linters, etc.) anyway which would negate the benefit of the screen refresh rate being faster
m45t3r 6y ago
Yeah, this is my favorite gimmick of my Samsung Galaxy S20. 120Hz display+240Hz touch sensor makes everything feels so fast and responsive, this is the first Android device that feels faster than my iPad.
- andai 6y ago
  Does a 240hz sensor help when the display responds at half that rate? I guess it's because the latencies stack on top of each other?
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    It's quite common for the touch panel to run at 2x the display refresh rate. Eg, 120hz touch panels have been quite common for years on phones despite the 60hz disply. It helps both slightly with latency directly, but it also gives you more points to sample from for input prediction which then helps with latency even more. Or for things like drawing applications it'll give you smoother curves assuming the drawing app looks at all intermediate touch samples.
- setpatchaddress 6y ago
  out of curiosity, which iPad?
  - m45t3r 6y ago
    It on iPad 6. I think if I had an iPad Pro (that also has a 120Hz screen I think?) it would be the same.
bonoboTP 6y ago
And on the other side: I very much notice the difference between a corded mouse and a Bluetooth mouse (not a cheap one). It's not unusable, but frustrating enough that I prefer the corded ones. And I'm not a gamer, just doing office stuff, browsing and programming.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  If you haven't already, get a high refresh rate monitor and a 1000 reports/sec "gaming" mouse. The Razer Viper Mini is light, which adds to the feeling of responsiveness. I've bought a couple for other people and they love them. I recently got a 165 Hz monitor for my decade-old PC (Sandy Bridge era) and with my (now old) G302 mouse, it's like having a new, much faster PC.
- ragnese 6y ago
  Wireless devices are still hit-or-miss for me. I've also found that my wireless keyboard and mouse actually perform worse if I have WiFi enabled. -_-
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    Are you using 2.4 GHz wifi?
    - ragnese 6y ago
      Yes. This is at my office, so I'm assuming there's good reason for 2.4 GHz. Maybe just range?
      - cozzyd 6y ago
        Bluetooth is pretty close in frequency to 2.4 GHz wifi, so could imagine some interference there!
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  I have tried like 5 Bluetooth mice, since BL4.0 the latency has improved from 'terrible' to 'tolerable'. It might be something to do with the windows bluetooth stack, as i noticed the respobce was more sluggish during high CPU use, while USB mice seem unaffected. The same logitech mouse performs much faster through their universal wireless adapter than trhough bluetooth (it has 2 modes), they also have lightspeed adapter, but I haven't noticed much difference.
rsanheim 6y ago
Now if only someone made a 34” ultra wide with 120Hz+. In particular one with 5120 x 2160 resolution. Maybe in 2022 at the rate high hertz monitors are coming for non-gaming uses...
- ezluckyfree 6y ago
  I agree. I'd rather hi-dpi 32"+ monitors first though. Hidpi displays are becoming standard on top-end laptops but on desktop you're almost out of luck. It's wild that the only hidpi 32" monitor is ~$5000, and it was released a few years ago now. My eyeballs need that sweet crisp text.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    What are you calling "hi-dpi"? There's a ton of 4k monitors in the 27" to 32" range, which are definitely higher DPI than typical. And for a lot less than $5000.
    - ezluckyfree 6y ago
      I'm typing this on a 4k, 32" monitor, which is 137.68 DPI, but I also have a Dell XPS 15, which is 4K and 15", 293.72 DPI, and the difference in sharpness is astounding. The other problem with hidpi scaling (200%) at 4k 32", is that everything is huge, and you lose a lot of screen real estate. Honestly I think 8k 36" is the sweet spot.
      - turtlebits 6y ago
        I have the same displays as you- Dell 4k @ 15" and currently using a 32" 4k (I sit 2ft away from it). I also have a Macbook Pro 16 (3072×1920). I honestly don't see a substantial difference between any of them, and I'm generally pretty picky about resolution.
        ezluckyfree 6y ago
        Right but if you scale the 32" so you get the hidpi sharpness (and put it far away), you lose the real-estate that you could have on a 32" screen.
randogogogo 6y ago
This is also can be enhanced by tweaking up your mouse sample rates and whatnot. I used to do a lot of setting PS/2 mouse sample rates at 80Hz or more in late 90s that made Windows machines feel almost as nice to use as a Mac.
- 0-_-0 6y ago
  Isn't PS/2 interrupt based, therefore instantaneous? I think USB has 125 Hz polling rate by default which can be increased to 1000 Hz.
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    From Wikipedia: - > The interface has two main signal lines, Data and Clock. ... To transmit a byte, the device simply outputs a serial frame of data (including 8 bits of data and a parity bit) on the Data line serially as it toggles the Clock line once for each bit. Increasing the clock rate absolutely does reduce latency on a PS/2 port. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS/2_port
867-5309 6y ago
the rate of persistence of the human eye is around 25Hz, hence PAL and NTSC framerates. the upper bound for those hypersensitive is around 50Hz, hence the later generation monitors. anything above this is nothing more than marketing hype. it seeming smoother is merely a placebo to justify the extra cost
- sirsar 6y ago
  Are you claiming humans would fail an ABX test between a 60Hz and a 120Hz monitor? That sounds like a pretty extraordinary claim.
- genericone 6y ago
  So does it seem smoother or does it not? I definitely notice the difference with 60fps video and 120Hz+ monitors. Additionally, another thing I've noticed in the last decade is the very badly PWM-frequency-tuned LED headlights on some cars. Those engineers selected the wrong LED brightness and tuned it to terrible frequencies which leave flicker-trails when you look at or away from them. Get those PWM frequencies above 500Hz please! Especially get above 200Hz with your LED frequencies at the very least.
- outworlder 6y ago
  This is not correct. Let's not dispute and go with your claim of 25Hz. Even then, the problem is that eyes don't work like cameras or monitors. Our eyes don't work with "frames". Each receptor updates on its own time. It's easy to see that, if the updates are staggered, multiple sensors could perceive higher frame-rates, even if they can't individually. However, there's another angle to this. Disregarding input lag, which is a very real phenomenon and is greatly shortened by higher refresh, higher refresh rate monitors are able to show more 'discrete' steps for anything that's in motion. Our eyes (and brains) perceive this as movement 'smoothness', even if they can't quite make out every single frame that's displayed. You should try that yourself. Do a blind test.
- yathern 6y ago
  This is very incorrect. With video, every person can tell the difference between 30hz and 60hz, if they at least know what to look for. The easiest way to show this is by wiggling your mouse around quickly on a computer screen. At 30hz - you'll see the mouse teleporting around - hopping from spot to spot, but not moving. For example, if you stare in the middle, and jerk the mouse quickly to the right, you'll see the 4 or 5 spots where it rendered. With 60hz, you'll see the 9 or 10 spots - and have a stronger illusion of movement. With 120hz, it might even look as smooth as a real object flying across your screen.
Baeocystin 6y ago
I bought a 165Hz gsync screen years ago for gaming. I bought all of my other high-refresh screens because wow computing feels so much better in the day-to-day desktop because of it! Not joking in the least.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  My brother swears by his 140hz display, I have used it for a bit and came away feeling underwhelmed - I prefer my 4K 10bit 60hz display
  - Baeocystin 6y ago
    I can understand if you need the pixels and bit depth for color work. I just work with sRGB, and the panel I have is fine for that. I really do like the speed, though.

wojtczyk 6y ago

I love this. Thanks for sharing your measurements!

maxekman 6y ago

Wonderful article! Thanks!

nsxwolf 6y ago

I'm surprised the Apple 2e's is so high, given the seemingly simplistic nature of the machine. I'm also surprised the TI-99/4A's isn't higher, given how complex it is - with its BASIC interpreter implemented on top of a virtual machine.

sumtechguy 6y ago
Probably just the nature of the sort of chips you could buy at the time and their scan rates and debounce circuitry. As time marches on we have added a lot of abstraction into the mix. One thing I used to do to make old DOS computers 'feel faster' was to turn up the keyboard rates in the BIOS.
isolli 6y ago
In hindsight, it validates the extremely expensive purchase my father made 35 years ago ;) I loved that computer!
colanderman 6y ago
TI's throughput certainly was slower. It's been a few decades, but I'm pretty sure it was possible to type faster than the interpreter could keep up. (As a point of reference, listing a program was unbearably slow on the TI, and unreadably fast on the //e.) I suspect it's just that input processing is so cheap on those early architectures, that latency is really dominated by hardware constraints and not by CPU (however slow it might be). Certainly, on the //e, I'm pretty sure the input routine did little more than copy the character to the input buffer and the screen buffer and advance the cursor. The TI's probably was not much more complicated, despite being implemented in bytecode.

buildbot 6y ago

In the appendix they mention something interesting - that apples CPU performance advantage isn’t magic, but very careful planning and testing on the right things, namely the entire App Store’s contents. That’s a huge dataset of real world applications you can test your designs against.

gswdh 6y ago

I wished computer/OS makers would consider this more. Frankly, I don’t see why this isn’t in the region of one refresh rate period of the display.

faeyanpiraat 6y ago

I’ve recently upgraded from a gtx550ti (~10 y.o.) card to an RX 570 (3 y.o.), and even though I get way more performance, it introduced a noticeable inputlag in csgo. It just doesnt feel right, and slowmo video capture confirms it.

lifeformed 6y ago
Did vsync get turned on somehow?
- jessermeyer 6y ago
  Additionally, the input lag may have been there all along but was not perceivable due to low performance.
  - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
    No I've done the same slowmo recording test, and it was not there. Also V-Sync is off now. AMD even has an "anti lag" feature which apparently does nothing. Edit: I have a Ryzen CPU, I've expected the full AMD system to work together better.
    - jessermeyer 6y ago
      Interesting. To be clear, the only change was the GFX card (and driver)?
      - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
        There is a minimal chance that I might have used the VGA port on my monitor, and now I'm using DVI. I'm like 80% confident I've used DVI in the previous setup, but there still is a chance that I'm wrong. I'll probably try getting a dvi->vga converter in the next couple of days and see if this is the culprit.
        6y ago

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

This is interesting but perhaps shows that keyboard/screen latency isn't as important as it once was. Just about every application on Apple 2e relied on keypresses being shown on the screen. Modern devices and operating systems are displaying 'windows', streaming 3d graphics etc. and running a myriad of other services at the same time.

robotresearcher 6y ago
Sure, the computer is doing a lot more. Apps are still responding to key presses or mouse clicks though. Fortnite, AutoCad or Excel: I press a button I want to see the effect. Increasing delay strictly reduces your ability to control the system via feedback. Even in a mostly passive app like a video player, it sucks if the play/pause button has a long-delayed effect. The tendency is to press the button over and over and feel correctly that we have lost control of the app.
tyu2 6y ago
Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing, do we have high speed games today as we used to, e.g. [1]? If game developers assume shitty hardware and software, they won't make things that require better latency. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1TDNliM99U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1TDNliM99U
- qayxc 6y ago
  First of all, Quake III was released in 1999 - that's way after the low-latency days already. Secondly, not every PC in 1999 was capable of even running QIII (let alone at a high frame rate). During the days of true low-latency gaming, actual game frame rates were in the low 20s and even consoles rarely achieved 50 or 60 fps.
  - tyu2 6y ago
    The link was to an OSP Tourney Q3A mod playing Clan Arena mode, which was released later and became popular even later with better hardware available (another competitive mod was CPMA). You are right on one thing though, default configuration was in 20s of fps on a typical machine of the time and was in fact unplayable, so people had to configure game graphics to simplify it a lot to get high enough framerate, it was basically doom-like looking graphics, no effects, no textures, no shadows, etc. If a game was playable at 20s of fps, I don't think it deserves a title of low-latency gaming.

macjohnmcc 6y ago

I feel the latency when connecting over a VPN to a remote computer and using RDP to a computer on that network. It is not a pleasant experience.

hedora 6y ago
Latency to “the cloud” is 10-20ms for most people in the US. (Assuming they’re connecting directly to the closest regional data center.)
- acdha 6y ago
  Your assumption is very optimistic for a number of people: a generation of security policy wanted everything routed through central monitoring points so you get home network -> vpn -> corporate data center -> remote server and back, all in the hope that the monitoring system would see malicious traffic (since attackers know how to use encryption & obfuscation, this is usually easily bypassed).
matsemann 6y ago
A few years ago I had work on a thin-client for a client. After a while I didn't notice, I think my brain just got slower, heh.

angrygoat 6y ago

This reminds me of graphing calculators in the late 90s when I was at school. I initially had a HP, but it took what felt like 500ms to respond when I pressed a key. I switched to a TI-83 and it was chalk and cheese - instant response; you could even write programs in assembly. There was a small cottage industry of traded programs for it.

clankyclanker 6y ago
It's still there! https://ticalc.org/ https://ticalc.org/
wtallis 6y ago
HP's early graphing calculators definitely had very high latency. But they dealt with it properly, which PC's don't. An HP-48 series calculator will buffer dozens of keypresses, and handle them in-order as if the UI had been instantly responsive. So you don't actually have to wait for a menu or dialog box to be drawn to the screen—if you've learned the necessary input sequence to perform the task you want, you can enter it at full speed. The keyboards were also very high quality with great tactile feedback, so you didn't need visual feedback on the screen to know your key press had been registered.
- randogogogo 6y ago
  I'd pile on that the programmability of the HPs was amazing compared to the TIs. The manual for my HP-48sx was a chonkyboi but man could I do so much with it. Once I figured out how to calculate pitch frequencies for equal temperament (just a mathematical series) I was using the BEEP function (IIRC) to have my calculator play music.
- ptx 6y ago
  PCs used to do this, before GUIs got all asynchronous on us. Try it with the old-old-old-old-style start menu (the one from NT 4 and 5).
- snvzz 6y ago
  I own both hp50g and some TI calcs (86/89). I'd describe hp and ti as laggy and slick, respectively. The 50g is what I used in university, but now I seldom touch it as the 86/89 are so much more pleasant to use.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mdoms 6y ago

I love the new Windows Terminal (wt.exe) but this is one area where they really messed up. The latency between a keypress and a character appearing on screen makes the whole thing feel like a cheap experience. I have no idea what's causing the latency. I suspect there some very big fancy rendering pipeline occurring, because when I open Windows Terminal I get the nVidia overlay popup which normally only comes up when I launch games, indicating the terminal is using a GPU-based rendering engine. Which I'm sure confers some interesting benefits, but it's a heavy price to pay when, at the end of the day, it's just a terminal.

emteycz 6y ago
Aren't games normally known for extremely low latencies?
- mdoms 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm far from an expert on rendering and latency, but presumably game developers put a ton of effort into ensuring that the pixels are pushed with as little input latency as possible. This may not have been a priority for Microsoft in their terminal.
  - zeusk 6y ago
    The whole Terminal code is open source https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/src/renderer/dx/DxRenderer.cpp#L1077 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/src/renderer... The first comment in this function (DxEngine::StartPaint), for example: // If retro terminal effects are on, we must invalidate everything for them to draw correctly. // Yes, this will further impact the performance of retro terminal effects. // But we're talking about running the entire display pipeline through a shader for // cosmetic effect, so performance isn't likely the top concern with this feature.
    - mdoms 6y ago
      Nice find!

dredmorbius 6y ago

Discussed at the time, 162 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16001407

x87678r 6y ago

Now do WFH with remote desktop that is on a shared VM a few states away with a bunch of other devs. Its horrible.

locusofself 6y ago
All my coworkers remote desktop into their workstations at the office from a laptop at home to do dev work. I can't do it. vscode remote development extension has been my savior when I need to code locally and then flip over to RDP to run the deployment from a specific environment (the office)
- Aperocky 6y ago
  The workflow requires RDP? That sucks. Should build some command line equivalent.
  - dspillett 6y ago
    The dev desktops in the office are a controlled environment that can be locked down. We need that as we work in closely regulated industries handling potentially sensitive data. At least until we arrange for everyone to have company provided dedicated work laptops which we can (mostly) lock down to the satisfaction of our clients and their auditors, but the switch to mostly remote working this year happened at roughly the same time as budgets were squeezed a bit (bet you can guess why!) so that hasn't happened across the board yet. Allowing RDP from non-secured devices "for the time being" is iffy, but we are getting away with it due to the circumstances.
zwieback 6y ago
I have a project right now where I have to connect to a VPN, then remote-desktop to a "jumper PC" that's dual-homed via VNC to a segregated PC running Windows XP on a manufacturing tool we recently got out of mothball to backfill Covid supply chain gaps. On the plus side - the ancient version of Visual Studio on that tool is surprisingly snappy!
randogogogo 6y ago

Jipazgqmnm 6y ago

Did you wiggle the mouse while measuring? ;)

fmakunbound 6y ago

If you're typing into a Slack window, I think you can multiply all that by 10.

bob1029 6y ago
Modern software is such garbage. We could make slack feel as good as counterstrike WRT input latency if we really cared hard enough about the end user experience. Unfortunately, chasing shiny (laggy) technologies is way more popular and marketable.
WillYouFinish 6y ago
Yes! Slack, Teams, Discord, Spotify. All of these are horrible. I hate to use them. Good thing is I only have to use one of them. I wish there was more modern low latency software.
bentcorner 6y ago
Check out ripcord: https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ I haven't used it with slack but it works just fine with discord. You don't get voice noise cancellation with ripcord but you don't need that if you use rtxvoice anyway.
xxpor 6y ago
i don't even bother editing my dumb typos because the latency of just hitting up + e has to be over 750 ms. Complete garbage.
jb_s 6y ago
Electron is the new Flash. Bloat and lag. Using it is understandable as a tactical choice when it's expensive to maintain separate native apps everywhere but man, Slack is a 25 billion dollar company - surely they can write some native apps? Same deal or worse with Teams, the performance of which is goddamn execrable. My laptop is an awful 2012 thing but it shouldn't take 5 seconds to switch between chats.
markdog12 6y ago
Happens all the time: https://mobile.twitter.com/programmer_just/status/1253098759266893827 https://mobile.twitter.com/programmer_just/status/1253098759...

Reason077 6y ago

It would be interesting to measure input latency on the new M1 Macs and add them to the table. It certainly feels like they’ve managed to claw a bit back.

utopcell 6y ago

Regarding monitors, OLEDs have a much faster response compared to LCDs. See this [1] for an example. As of why keyboard scanning has become so abysmally slow, it's beyond me. You'd think that this would be a solved problem even for cheap wired keyboards. [1] https://youtu.be/x9n8Hz_RLqw https://youtu.be/x9n8Hz_RLqw

Retr0spectrum 6y ago

> Although we don’t have enough data to really tell why the blackberry q10 is unusually quick for a non-Apple device, one plausible guess is that it’s helped by having actual buttons, which are easier to implement with low latency than a touchscreen. The Blackberry q10 runs Blackberry OS 10, which is based on QNX, which has a realtime microkernel.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I use both Microsoft Office 97 and LibreOffice for writing. The former runs on virtualized Windows Me. The latter runs "native". Keypress responsiveness when typing is night and day, and given where I'm posting this comment, you can guess who has the advantage. Platform: GNU(Linux)Mint Xfce

sam_lowry_ 6y ago
I can't guess
- kangalioo 6y ago
  Microsoft Office 97 most probably
- gorgoiler 6y ago
  The hint is in the configuration. The Windows setup is convoluted, awkward, and weird sounding compared to the native app. They are using it for a reason though: it’s much much more responsive than native Linux LibreOffice.
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    It's a bit weird, I guess, but it's hardly convoluted or awkward. I downloaded a pre-baked iso for the os, another one for the office, and in about 10 minutes had a working, tolerable writing environment.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  i'm sorry, have you seen someone about that?
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
Open Office feels a bit faster than Libre Office.
userbinator 6y ago
The former runs on virtualized Windows Me ...which is, like the rest of the DOS-based Windows from Windows/386 onwards, itself a sort of hypervisor architecture --- DOS applications effectively run in VMs thanks to V86 mode, giving native performance. The difference is very noticeable if you open something like MS-DOS EDIT on Win9x vs. NT 4/2K/XP --- the latter runs in an emulated environment and the latency is enormous.

tenaciousDaniel 6y ago

At least I know I'm not wearing nostalgia goggles when I remember my early days on my Windows 95, and how fast the input responses were. It definitely feels as if input latency has degraded.

qayxc 6y ago
It definitely has - PS/2 is interrupt driven, while USB requires polling. This alone introduces enough lag to be felt during normal use.
- userbinator 6y ago
  The difference is big enough that people have hacked the drivers to let you overclock mouses: https://github.com/LordOfMice/hidusbf https://github.com/LordOfMice/hidusbf

kdrag0n 6y ago

It's worth noting that it's still possible to achieve low latency with modern hardware and even software to some extent, even with all the input filtering on touchscreens. The modern GPU rendering stack won't be able to do it, but I was able to do it in software without giving up the Linux kernel, IRQs, or the input stack. My experiment got down to ~10 ms average tap latency on a 60 Hz phone with a touchscreen scanning at 240 Hz: https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1291213993219039232 https://twitter.com/kdrag0n/status/1291213993219039232 Source code: https://github.com/kdrag0n/touchpaint https://github.com/kdrag0n/touchpaint I have to say that writing on phones really feels much more interactive and natural when the latency is so low. I don't personally feel like these ranges of latency are that big of a deal on desktop computers where input is indirect, but it feels much more significant on phones where your interactions are right underneath your finger.

nomel 6y ago
The newest Apple Pencil is apparently around 9ms [1]. It really does fool your brain into thinking something is coming out of the tip. [1] https://www.macworld.com/article/3402336/apple-pencil-changes-and-improvements-in-ipados-13.html https://www.macworld.com/article/3402336/apple-pencil-change...
- sneak 6y ago
  If only they cared about such things for Terminal.app, so we didn't have the extra step of installing Alacritty on every single machine to improve the situation (and not to anywhere near 9ms, even).
  - sushisource 6y ago
    I've always found this a bit funny - why are people so concerned with input latency at the terminal? (I get why I care with a phone, or gaming). It's not like anyone's typing hundreds of characters a second. I use Alacritty, but mostly because I like the way it's config file works and it does nice font rendering. The latency thing barely even registers.

vehemenz 6y ago

I would love for CRT monitors to make a comeback. Sure, they are less portable and difficult to manufacture/repair. But their combination of refresh rate (without blur), image quality, and color reproduction are still second to none. Considering the price of an nVidia 3080, which is standard PC gaming equipment, there must be a market for high end screens for gamers.

ddingus 6y ago
And it could be streamlined. No need for a bazillion types. Color and raster flexibility are the two bright spots for me. Glowing phosphors in tubes is just a great tech.
zamadatix 6y ago
Until relatively recently I'd have agreed but at this point I'd take a modern display over a CRT assuming we're talking about high end. Popular options in the high end are displays like the LG 48 CX or some of the "G-Sync Ultimate" monitors like the Predator x27. These kinds of displays start at prices higher than a 3080 though so you don't hear about the market as much since people usually expect to spend less on a monitor than a GPU and the 3080 is generally consider the top of most high end price ranges.
fctorial 6y ago
I too like the feeling of xrays shooting into my eyes point blank for 12 hrs every day.
- xxpor 6y ago
  Electrons
  - tosseuthansia 6y ago
    tens of kilovolt electrons decelerating in a short distance? There'll be x-rays. However, CRTs used leaded glass to block (most) of it.
6y ago

jfax 6y ago

I once got so frustrated with the typing latency of editing a Confluence page that I remarked to my coworkers that the "baud rate is unacceptable".

gorgoiler 6y ago

Please please please point me to instructions on how to build a low latency PC. I crave some good old fashioned responsive computing, but moreover I want to fill my classroom with these devices and show a new generation that, to borrow a catchphrase from a far more noble cause, it gets better.

mcguire 6y ago

Huh. I don't remember the Palm Pilot being noticeably slow.

testxyz 6y ago

Test

doggydogs94 6y ago

I remember writing code on a pdp-8 where we had to write code to display the character which was typed.

markc 6y ago

Back in the day (early 80's) I remember using a VAX 780 @ 1 MIPS via time-sharing with 60 other simultaneous users. Editing with EDT felt quite snappy. Amazing.

coldtea 6y ago

One thing I haven't seen is how does the M1 fare in terms of input latency (e.g. in text editors, like in those old tests done with vim, sublime, intellij, etc: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/). I have a hunch it eliminates some...

desmap 6y ago

FWIW, why the Windows Terminal is so responsive from its collaborator: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327#issuecomment-447391705 https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/327#issuecommen... This was posted here few times but it's still an interesting read in this context.

krige 6y ago

Too bad the author (perhaps strategically) dodged the two seminal for their era microcomputer braches, the 16-bit Ataris and the Amigas. I once read that properly written Amiga software achieved around 16ms latency and would like to see that verified or debunked.