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Comment by arbirk | Hacker News Reader

You won't notice 8ms difference in input lag

lots of people can notice that. my last job involved meticulously timing our software's input-tp-display latency, testing viewers' responses to it, and fighting for each and every ms we should shave off of it.

For my sins, I have recently been called upon to cold boot and then provision a few dozen Samsung tablets by hand. The "laggy Lagdroid piece of lagshit" pasta has been repeated a lot. I swear to God it just ignores ten percent of touch events if it's doing anything in the background.

I’ve been swapping back and forth between a MacBook Pro and a Linux workstation lately. The input latency difference is insane - macOS is sooo much worse than Linux. It’s gotten to the point that I’m porting code to Linux just so I don’t have to use my editor from macOS.

I don’t know how many milliseconds the difference is, but going back and forth it’s so obvious to me that it’s painful.

Anyone can notice an entire frame of input lag.

The question is more whether it’ll bother you.

I have 165Hz monitors. Software feels noticeably more snappy.

As a seasoned gamer, and one time world record holder, I absolutely can notice 8ms of lag.

Couldn’t be more wrong.

agree

Musicians can feel latencies as low as 1ms.

Apple is designing pro gear for its target audience.

Do you have a source for that? I saw a study a short while ago showing the “just noticeable difference” for audio latency was best case around 26ms.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3678299.3678331

I definitely notice the difference between 10 ms and 26 ms. 26 ms already feel sluggish when playing drums, guitars or keyboard instruments. But there is no way anyone can feel a difference of 1 ms.

The study wasn’t conducted with musicians making music.

It depends on the frequency. At higher frequencies, the ear is capable of higher time precision. It's why a snare pops and a bass drum blooms.

That’s audio latency, not musicians doing music. In my experience if you have two musicians that are supposed to be playing unison, 5-6 ms is enough to feel “off”

I highly doubt anyone notices 1ms latency. I might believe rare people can notice 10ms.

Anecdotically, 7ms vs 3ms latency is felt as weirdly heavy action when playing midi keyboard. It's not felt as latency, but it's felt. And I bet the difference could be reliably established in double-blind testing (3 samples, find an outlier).

1ms seems less believable, but I wouldn't be surprised, if some people could notice that too.

Again I have to point to this Microsoft Research Video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

Fantastic video. QED.

Fun fact, 1ms is the approximately the amount of time it takes for sound to travel 1 foot. Do musicians move all their speakers to be within one foot of their ears? Do people in a band notice a difference if they're not standing within 1 foot of their partners? No, they don't.

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