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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

How you handled CRT vs non-CRT screens?

I still use CRT screens, not because of latency, but because of better contrast and colour reproduction, and the capability to use whatever resolution I want.

I noticed that in new games, and using newer video-cards, there is some kinda weird lag there, like if they were geared on purpose for slow LCDs (there seemly even some variables that you can control on AMD cards, using Windows Registry, or tweaking the Linux driver, related to screen input lag, they are on the "PowerPlay" part of the drivers for some reason though, I couldn't figure yet what they do exactly).

EDIT: Also, I stopped playing music-games almost entirely, I found many of them completely unplayable on my setup, I just can't find the correct settings to make the timing work. The least aggravating one is "Necrodancer" that seemly is really good in calibrating.

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There are so many AV setups, we had to leave calibration to the user (we tried with auto-calibration but it could not always be perfect).

The fundamental problem is that there are two independent delays that both depend on your individual system: the delay from the time that the console produces a video frame to the time that the user sees it, and the delay from the time that the console produces a sound to the time that the user hears it. In a beatmatching game, you really need the user's perceptions to be in sync, which means delaying either the video or the audio. Of course, the more you delay one or the other, the more the repercussions you run into.

In a regular video game, it's not a big deal if you fire a gun and hear the shot 50ms later, but in a beatmatching game, that delay is really noticeable.

In a competitive twitch shooter, 10 ms lag is an important handicap. And that is less than one frame at 60 FPS.

Many modern games buffer frames to render so the rendering is up to 3 frames behind the simulation (in the UE4 case anyway) . in a multiplayer game, you've got these 3 frames of rendering, plus network latencyt both ways, plus a frame of simulation time on the server, and then (depending on the engine) a possible extra frame of input latency when taking the input from the controller to processing it.

Ah, the times of getting a perfect setup for music games: the combination of a simple TV with low lag (introduced by picture scalers and other processing), and a simplest stereo connected with RCA cables.

Both Rock Band and Guitar Hero allow you to calibrate your display latency to compensate for that - since you're playing songs with static timing that's possible.

I'm not sure what you mean by "music games" but I've been playing StepMania for awhile now and it seems to handle latency just fine.

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