If your computer is so slow that it takes multiple seconds for letters to appear, something else is happening. Even old “fast” software is going to feel laggy if your system is so bogged down that it can’t keep up with typing inputs on that level.
Here is a short video from Microsoft (about 10 years old now) on the experience of using a touchscreen with 100ms of delay vs 1ms showing the steps in between. The difference is extraordinary for the user even if the end result is the same. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4
That’s additional input delay, not absolute latency.
More importantly, the visual effect you’re seeing isn’t the perception of input delay. It’s the positional difference between the finger location and the box location. Typing in a terminal doesn’t have the same visual difference. In fact, using a mouse doesn’t have the same visual difference because your finger isn’t right next to the screen for comparison. Try dragging a window across your screen right now. The “lag” is easily on the order of the 100ms shown in this demo, but you won’t find it anywhere near as disorienting because your finger isn’t on the screen for visual reference.
It’s not possible to have 1ms lag unless you have a 1000Hz screen and zero processing time for the inputs.
Compare that to the standard 60Hz displays that most laptops and cellular phones use. At 60Hz, the screen only updates once every 17ms. Add input lag, processing lag, rendering delay, buffering delay, and other delays and it’s nearly impossible to go from input to screen action in under 30ms. Most games are on the order of 60-80ms.
The individual pixels in your LCD can’t even toggle from black to white in 1ms.
A lot of the HN comments here are misunderstanding the time scales involved in all of this. For reference, a blink of an eye is about 100ms
30ms is close to extremely annoying. You will notice a 30ms latency in a video game when moving around, turning etc.
Having that kind of latency on mouse movement can make it close to impossible to hit fast targets in a shooter for instance, because it will destroy perceived synchronicity of input with the response, confusing your brain and destroying immersion.
The same can be said about navigating in a terminal based text editor. A few milliseconds of delay can take your brain from "I am the cursor" to "I am controlling this cursor, which respond a short time after I execute a certain action". Frustrating.
What is also super frustrating to me when using vim in a slow terminal is that I will consistently overshoot the line where I meant to place the cursor. I realize most of the latency probably comes from my brain and nervous system, but a few ms can be just enough to make the cursor end up in the next line instead.
I do. And it's not just me. There's a reason many players of fast twitchy shooters are playing either without vsync, or vsync + uncapped FPS[1] (+ the newer "low latency" modes of modern drivers, but mileages vary).
This stuff has already been well understood, A/B tested, and documented back in the CS1.6 days. A CS player who hasn't at least put some thought into it or doesn't care is extremely rare. And CS is still topping the steam charts daily at up to a million or more concurrent players.
People have no issues noticing vsync ON vs OFF (well that's easy) or vsync + uncapped vs capped FPS in blind tests. I challenge you to get a friend to perform a blind test with you to try this for yourself.
There's also a reason that reduced input lag is part of the sales pitch of everything from monitors and GPUs to input devices. It's because people do care (irrespective of the effectiveness of what vendors try to sell you). Hardware manufacturers, driver developers, and game studious aren't putting time and money into this because nobody gives a damn.
[1]: vsync + uncapped FPS is called "fast" vsync in nvidia driver settings
Edit: I'm going to give an example of why these numbers matter in fast shooters.
Suppose you pit two players of equal skill against each other, each having a reaction time range of 300ms - 400ms, and whoever reacts first wins. One player is playing with a total input latency (mouse to screen) of 50ms, and the other with a latency of 30ms (these are typical numbers of vsync on vs vsync off).
The player with 20ms less latency is going to win about 70% of the time.
FWIW most people who semi-seriously game don't use 60 Hz screens and don't use normal V-Sync. They use 120-155 Hz screens, or increasingly 240 Hz screens and fast v-sync (=driver-managed triple buffering combined with a frame queue length of 0 or 1). They also try to run the game with as high FPS as possible.
That’s not true, though. It takes more than 30ms just to render your frame, deliver it to the monitor, and wait for a screen refresh.
PC Gamer recently measured some actual latency results. They found 60-80ms was fairly standard for lag between input and on-screen events: https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...
Notably, the online game streaming services have on the order of 150ms of latency. It starts to become noticeable, but it’s still entirely playable for many. If the gamers can handle 150ms of input lag, certainly we can deal with 30ms while typing in our consoles.
For cheap non-CRT screens you are correct. Otherwise, not so much. And even if you're using a cheap screen, latencies of 50ms vs 30ms (typical numbers for vsync on vs vsync off) definitely have an impact on player performance besides just feeling more/less sluggish. See also my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806493
> https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...
That PC gamer article is horrible and amateurish. There's no mention of what vsync/nvidia driver settings they used etc. Also games like Destiny are pretty far from being optimized for low input lag.
With CRTs and properly optimized/coded games like CS you can achieve input lag as low as 5ms (though that's just the time until the monitor begins drawing the first rows of pixels after the change).
Here's a few links on input lags measurements:
http://www.esreality.com/post/2691945/microsecond-input-lag-...
https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1381&hil...
http://esreality.com/post/2640619/input-lag-tests-ql-csgo-q3...
People doing A/B tests:
https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1134
And a demonstration that even input lag as low as 10ms can be noticeable:
So, I just made the following experiment. I filmed my screen and mouse at the same time, then grabbed a window and flicked as fast as I could.
On my 120 Hz screen the window starts moving within five to six frames (at 240 frames per second video) of the mouse moving, meaning an end-to-end latency of around 20 ms.
Windows 10, nVidia graphics card with hardware scheduling, Ryzen CPU, using the cheapest 120/144 Hz screen that was available at the time (<200 €).