Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

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> When you touched a Razr or a Palm phone, there was a delay. It felt sluggish and slow.

I always felt like resistive screens were more responsive than capacitive screens.

Case in point: My 3DS resistive screen and Palm Centro responded instantly. I think their downside was the necessary use of the stylus (because of the additional precision, their UIs required you to pull out the stylus before you could do anything effective).

What the Apple iPod Touch / iPhone did, was allow you to touch without using a stylus.

Anyway, I read this post as if its a mirror-image of my reality. The one thing I remember about Apple's capacitive push was that it felt slower than what I was used to. Honest.

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With that being said: I've played fighting games vs opponents who can 1-frame link and counter-throws within 7-frames (115 milliseconds). I'm well aware of the human-brain's capability to process data far faster than most people realize.

Musicians, Video Game players, Athletes... I expect most of them to have reaction speeds well above average: below the 200ms typical human. Even then, "average" humans have far better reaction speeds and ability to perceive things that happen in factions-of-a-second (at least, once you make them aware of those things).

UI-speed is absolutely a great feature. I just disagree that Apple's iPod Touch or iPhone was a good representation of that.

Anecdotal, but speed and refresh rate are really important for gaming. I thought >60fps was a gimmick, but a friend's new screen convinced me otherwise. It's visually obvious up to around 120fps. Moving the mouse around, I can see increase in frame rate to about 200hz.

I upgraded my monitor to 144hz, got a low delay mouse and headset (some headsets have over 400ms delay and audio response is faster than visual!). My ranking in games I've played for years has gone up about 1 standard deviation. I'm at my record high ranking in every game and it continues to rise.

Likely biased study, but Nvidia found an eyebrow raising difference in player performance when using higher refresh rates. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/geforce-gives-you-...

Similar anecdote: I recently investigated tablets to use for drawing.

Everybody online said the non-plus-ultra was the iPad Pro, even compared to other name-brand devices from Samsung/Microsoft.

So I tried them both, and wow. 120fps and a screen optimized for low delay really makes an enormous difference.

With all other tablets, it was more a question of "well how more or less awkward does this feel to use", where that question didn't even come up with the iPad.

I know this sounds like shilling, but I recommend just trying it out on a real device sometime, even or especially if you have no intent of buying one.

Gaming stuff is also low delay. My screen tested at 4ms and gaming mouse at 6ms.

Newer studies have shown recognition of events as fast as 13ms. https://news.mit.edu/2014/in-the-blink-of-an-eye-0116

More than 30ms of delay is noticable. My old screen + mouse had a delay of ~50 crudely tested. My old bluetooth headset was over 400ms!

I totally believe you that delay is noticable. I haven't used iPhone, but Android has terrible UI lag virtually everywhere (pointless animations don't help, pro tip you can turn these off in developer options)

> My old bluetooth headset was over 400ms!

Which headset did you switch to?

I bought the HyperX CloudX Flight (what a name) wireless gaming headset about three months ago, and I was shocked at how much latency I could feel in something that was supposed to be a dedicated gaming headset.

There's no inherent reason that a wireless headset has to have more latency than a wired headset, analog wireless being the extreme example of no added latency, but a purpose-built wireless headset seems like it would use some digital wireless protocol that is optimized for low latency, instead of buffering something like 100ms of audio in the channel. That ~100ms to ~150ms of latency really impacts reaction times.

So, I could switch to a wired headset... I just wish I could find a wireless headset that didn't suck. Microsoft just recently introduced their new "Xbox Wireless Headset", which looks awesome, but... the absence of any latency specification is not encouraging.

Gaming headsets are generally all low delay. HyperX stuff is all 50ms or less. The biggest thing is just don't use bluetooth which has terrible notorious delay.

Proprietary USB dongles for low delay headelsets is standard for foreseeable future.

Don't switch to wired, there's no point. Chances are, your HyperX headset has same latency as a wired connection.

How do you actually test screen and mouse delay? Is there some good software for testing each in isolation? I know of Is It Snappy? for iOS bu that only measures end-to-end latency.

It's pretty hard to measure end-to-end delay, Nvidia is only getting to it now with https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/reflex-low-latency...

Not easy. You can measure with your phone camera for visual delay but it's still suspect.

I measured my delay using a USB keyboard which are generally assumed to have zero delay but that's not great.

I base most of my delay numbers off of reviewers that have special hardware

I still play games in =<60fps, I see it like training in a gravity room ;)

Jokes aside, I'm happy I haven't had the same experience as you for gaming. Because then I would have to buy into high performance gaming. I can now happily play a game on something like Stadia or my old Macbook without having to feeling something is wrong or missing. Kinda like how watching movies on VHS was fine until HD came along. Now every artifact or resolution drop in a video is an annoyance.

Well that mostly depends on the kind of games you play... most Esports titles probably benefit from a higher refresh rate/more fps... While most Singleplayer games, except the occasional shooter, probably don't... With mmo's somewhere in between... It also quickly becomes very technical, as not only the display latency is interesting, but also the input latency.

It depends on the game. I play competitive shooters which I've gotten worse at as I age...

PC upgrades have given me 50ms reaction time advantage. Nearly what I lost since my early 20s. Feels nice to be "good" at games again

My setup gets 20 fps in TF2 on a good day :(.

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