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Comment by chamomeal | Hacker News Reader

Only sorta related, but it’s crazy that to me how much our standards have dropped for speed/responsiveness in some areas.

I used to play games on N64 with three friends. I didn’t even have a concept of input lag back then. Control inputs were just instantly respected by the game.

Meanwhile today, if I want to play rocket league with three friends on my Xbox series S (the latest gen, but the less powerful version), I have to deal with VERY noticeable input lag. Like maybe a quarter of a second. It’s pretty much unplayable.

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> I have to deal with VERY noticeable input lag. Like maybe a quarter of a second. It’s pretty much unplayable

Your experience is not normal.

If you’re seeing that much lag, the most likely explanation is your display. Many TVs have high latency for various processing steps that doesn’t matter when you’re watching a movie or TV, but becomes painful when you’re playing games.

This does not undermine chamomeal's argument. The whole point is that back in the N64 days, they could not possibly have had that experience. There was no way to even make it happen. The fact that today it's a real possibility when you've done nothing obviously wrong is a definite failure.

TVs back then supported a given standard (NTSC, PAL) and a lower resolution. CRTs couldn't "buffer" the image. Several aspects made it so that "cheating" was not possible.

It was either fast, or nothing. Image quality suffered, but speed was not a parameter.

With LCDs, lag became a trade-off parameter. Technology enabled something to become worse, so economically it was bound to happen.

>CRTs couldn't "buffer" the image

Sounds reasonable, but no.

https://www.extron.com/article/ntscdb4

Luckily newer TVs and console can negotiate a low-latency mode automatically. It's called ALLM (Auto-Low Latency Mode).

it's possible, but it seems to specifically be a rocket league on xbox series s problem, not a display problem. Other games run totally fine on the same display with no lag!

That may be an issue of going from a CRT tv to an LCD tv. As far as I am aware there was no software manipulation of the video input on a CRT. It just took the input and displayed it on the screen in the only way it could. Newer tvs have all kinds of settings to alter the video which takes processing time. They also typically have a game mode to turn off as much of it as it will allow.

I hear it claimed that you're only supposed to enable game mode for competitive multiplayer games -- but I've found that many single player games like Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet are unplayable without game mode enabled.

It could be my unusual nervous system. I'm really good at rhythm games, often clearing a level on my first try and amazing friends who can beat me at other genres. But when I was playing League of Legends, which isn't very twitchy, it seemed like I would just get hit and there was nothing I could do about it when I played on a "gaming" laptop but found I could succeed at the game when I hooked up an external monitor. I ran a clock and took pictures showing that the external monitor was 30ms faster than the built-in monitor.

Why should the user care whether the lag is introduced by the software in the controller, or the software in the gaming console, or the software in the tv.

The lag is due to some software. So the problem is with how software engineering as a field functions.

It’s not just the software, the analog electronics of LCD/LED screens are inherently laggy and have motion blur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_and_hold

How about the speed of going from a powered off console to playing the actual game? Sleep mode helps with resuming on console, but god forbid you’re on a pc with a game that has anti cheat, or comped menus. You will sit there, sometimes for a full minute waiting. I absolutely cannot stand these games.

My buddy booted up his PC after gaming on his PS5 for two weeks and every single app needed multi-gig updates. Xbox app, Logitech app, Discord, Windows 11, Chrome, Steam. The whole enchilada. Rage inducing compared to sticking a cart in an N64.

Or how channel surfing now requires a 1-2 second latency per channel, versus the way it was seemingly instant from the invention of television through the early 1990s.

Having a lot more channels is cool I guess, but it was much better to watch and listen to a staticy analog channel 20 years ago, than a digital channel today where there is no audio and the image freezes.

Heck yes! I recently dusted off (had to literally dust the inside of the cartridges to get past a black screen, lol) my old Sega Genesis (and bought an HDMI adaptor for it), and have been letting my school age sons play it. They haven't even commented on the basic graphics. They're like "wow dad, no boot time, no connecting to server time, no waiting to skip ads time". They love it.

How about you enable game mode on the TV you're using

Game mode is on! The input log is not with the display. Other games run fine.

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