I’m definitely freaking out. I’m trying to determine if there’s any reason whatsoever not to try and put a Paewang PCB in the custom being built for me instead of the PS360+.
18 ms. You just made my day.
I keep hearing that but it seems mostly that people are curious about how much this will affect them and that’s only natural. There is always going to be someone who blames lag for their loss whether it is legit or not. Or they’ll blame buttons, or lack of sleep, or say they don’t really care anyway (when they do). What is anyone supposed to do about that? All I can do is be honest about what I think about the thread topic. I am still more concerned about the validity of the numbers than about whether or not people are going to overreact or exaggerate their losses. It would definitely be premature at this point to start throwing away sticks.
First, thank you for taking the time to write out such a thorough response. I think maybe I didn’t express my question well enough, though. I really like the 3s Chun example to try and illustrate what I’m asking about, so I’m gonna go back to that, again. Also I see people complaining about frame counting, but I’m not sure how else to ask my question other than talking about vague feelings of how much time I have to confirm the super in my example, so please forgive me. In 3s as Chun, when you push low forward, you should be immediately buffering the super input, and then you have to decide whether or not to finish the input based off of whether the opponent blocked or was hit. The opponent recovers from a low forward’s hitstun in 14 frames (15 if hit while crouching). And there are 2 frames of start-up on Chun’s SA2. So, with no other factors involved, you’ve got a 12 frame window to decide to finish the super. Now I’m pretty sure the game itself introduces another 4 frames of delay? That part might be wrong; I’m no expert, and the frame-counting here is more to illustrate my question than to present a 100% accurate scenario, but if someone knows I’m wrong on that (or any of the other frame counting I’ve done), please correct me. But if I’m right, that brings the window down to 8 frames.
Now there are obviously other factors involved, not even just the monitor you’re playing on; I think people have been listing other sources of lag throughout the topic. So it probably ends up being less than 8 frames before we even get to your method of input (an arcade stick, for the purpose of my question) and human reaction. Is a 7 frame window a fair number to throw out there? Just as a number? That gives you just under 117ms to react before factoring in your arcade stick.
I’m not asking how fast human reaction time is when looking for a specific thing to react to. But I see a lot of people arguing that it’s slow enough that small amounts of input lag from your stick shouldn’t matter. My question is: wouldn’t it be exactly the opposite? Shouldn’t it be that the worse human reaction times are, the more crucial it is that you’re minimizing other sources of lag? If we’re already down to 117ms to decide whether to finish the input for Chun’s SA2 based on whether we see a specific thing we’re looking for (in this case, the hit animation), wouldn’t that apparent 23.5ms of difference between the FightStick PRO and the HRAP VX-SA become even more important the longer it takes to actually see it and mentally process that you’ve seen it? It seems to me that if we had super-human reaction times, then the difference would be negligible; if you can react to something instantly, a frame of difference between sticks should be far less likely to prevent you from getting your input to the game in time. The whole “human reaction time is slow, so input lag matters less” argument just seems backwards, to me.
At least in this thread, I don’t see people blaming losses over input lag from their sticks. The thing I saw most were people asking questions about the test in the interest of trying to make informed decisions on their purchases, because they’d like to minimize the input lag from their sticks (and you’ll notice even then, things like price and availability are playing factors in their decisions before 2~4ms are; I’ve seen at least one post where someone said they’re going for the eTokki).
Regarding the validity of the numbers, I would say that they are pretty reasonably comparable at this point. Having the same PCB tested three times and coming out as 3.92 / 3.97 / 3.98, on sets of 1,000 trials, certainly does speak to the consistency of the results. I suppose I could scale it back to only one decimal point instead of two since there isn’t much certainty down to the hundredth of a ms.
I think your numbers are just fine given the method, no one could expect you to do more than 1000 trials while swapping P1 for P2 and all that. I would just rather be on topic than arguing about whether or not lag makes any difference since that same discussion has been had over and over in so many contexts. Like instead of another misdirected post implying that people who notice lag are imagining things, someone should ask if the results were still as expected when comparing vs other sticks instead of the reference VX-SA stick. That would be a cool on topic thing to do.
@SlothFacts I think the power of the brain’s adaptability comes into play here. You still have to factor in match up knowledge and the likes, and whether or not the attack you’re doing is more likely to confirm and less likely in specific situations. You could also figure out how many frames of animation block stun and hit confirm have just in case you have to get used to looking for it earlier than you used to. Also, I have hit confirmed moves on a TV with 5 frames of lag it can be difficult but it’s possible to do. You just learn to adapt. It’s like timing a jumping attack. On a laggy TV you will land before getting a deep jump attack animation. So what would you do in that case? Do it a little earlier than what you see. A single frame of input lag isn’t going to be a game breaker. You’ll have slightly less time to react than normal. Now if the PCB was 3 frames of lag yeah we have a problem. 2 frames of lag on a PCB is also a problem. Sub 1 frame isn’t a big deal even if it’s close to the full frame of input lag. Comparing a stick that’s 2 ms vs 4 ms is rather silly.
Now of course, having the least amount of lag is good, but I wouldn’t knock an amazing PCB just because it was a little higher than another with less features or machine support.
This also doesn’t have a real world perspective, since it’s only taking into consideration when both players press a button at the same time. Have to keep in mind, the chances of that happening are slim. Every human reacts differently and will have different dexterity. Every human will also be analyzing what they see and predicting rock paper scissors differently as well. There is going to be extremely small chances that two players are going to press a button at the exact same time and one wins because his PCB is a few ms faster. That’s not very real world.
We also have to realize some PCB’s may actually have higher polling for button presses. Say, 1000 vs 100 every second.
I guess what it boils down to is people can adapt to 1 frame of lag. It’s not realistically noticeable and it’s easy to adapt to. You may have a slightly harder time reacting to something, but most of the time in fighting games you’re playing rock paper scissors anyway. Most of the time the player should also know risk vs reward on the attacks they do. IMO, there are many factors to fighting games, and PCB lag should probably be at the bottom of the barrel when looking for things you could do to improve your game.
Again, sharing information is dandy but people need to take responsibility for the causes that information may create. Sadly, there are going to be tons of people complaining about PCB lag now. I’ve already seen it on Facebook and people have sworn off buying a stick that has 2 or 4 ms more lag than another. IMO, it should be stated that X PCB is rated at 2 ms vs Y PCB at 3 ms, but that shouldn’t stop you from purchasing either one, as they’re both good. There should also be practical sense applied to it, as even a PS360+ at supposedly a near frame of input lag on 360 is fine to play on, otherwise all the tournament players who have one wouldn’t be winning tournaments.
Hell, that’s even considering how accurate this test is. Teyah still hasn’t told us his formula for concluding the ms he rated his sticks at.
What I’m concerned about is that ‘muddy’ feeling I get when I’m playing online when someone’s far away from me vs that more responsive feeling I get when I’m playing locally. Lets say I put the eTokki PCB in my custom instead of the PS360+. Would I actually notice it feeling more responsive? I’ll tell you that I have a TE and a TE-S and I can’t tell any difference between the two. Granted, its minuscule according to the test results. I can, however, notice a difference between 0 and 1 on the USF4 network simulation.
No because online lag is way different from local lag. If you’re playing online just enjoy it for what it is and don’t take it serious because it’s not the same game.
It’s really late here, so I haven’t read your post in full yet, but I saw this part at the end, and am reasonably sure I can answer. Where A is the number of times the faster stick won by two frames, B is the number of times the faster stick won by a frame, C is the number of times the slower stick won by a frame, and T is the total number of attempts:
(A*2 + B - C) / T = delay in frames
And then you convert the frames to ms (1 frame = 16.666…ms). So the final formula would be:
(A*2 + B - C) / T * 50/3 = delay in ms
And the zinger for me is that the reference for these values is arbitrary (fastest controller available to the tester?). You could have player x claiming that their stick has “y ms of lag,” and then player z claims that their stick has “q ms of lag” making their controller out to be either faster or slower than player x’s stick, when in reality their references for lag could be completely different. Silly.
The timing reference should be absolute. “Zero lag” should indicate that from the time a button is pressed, to the time the message is sent to the game console, zero time transpires. By this definition, nothing has zero lag because the controller must always wait to be polled by the game console, but it is an absolute and very reasonable reference which all controllers can be stacked up against. It also does not involve some crazy multicontroller setup using specific games and whatnot.
-ud
In Tekken you have a 14 frame window to react and break throws that even the best players miss many times.
Having 1-2 frames input delay just in your controller changes the chance of success by 8-15%.
It is not much but not negligible.
Not seeing the 18ms anywhere. Typo, surely?
I think you’ve missed the whole point of comparability that I’ve been stressing for the last couple of hundred posts in this thread. Could I replace the ms rating for the VX-SA with “x” and add an “x+” in front of each stick? Sure. But for the purposes of comparability it doesn’t add anything useful. You’re still going to be able to shave off the same amount of time coming from a slower stick up to the VX-SA which is what I’m most concerned with.
If you want to be helpful though, you could go measure the “true lag” of the Hori VX-SA, and I would consider using that as the baseline number to report instead of zero in my chart above. 
I emailed Akishop about this and they responded:
Hello sir,
Yes we know this, we will have a couple of prototypes testing under EVO for this purpose that address the latency issue, among other things.
We will write about it sometime after EVO so please wait for that.
Dude, if you’re that concerned just have your builder use the paewang. You lose autodetection, legacy, and a myriad of other options. That’s on you to figure out what’s more important though, you’re the customer.
But the burden of proof lies with you, not Undamned. To say “0.00ms” is really deceiving, if not an outright lie.
Question: I understand that the Hori RAP VX was used as the baseline for the 360 testing (ie, the HRAPVX is considered “X+0.00”, and all the other PCBs are “X+A.BC”, but since there’s nothing considered at “X+0.00” for PS3, on what basis were those comparisons made?
Anyhow, my thoughts:
-
I find that, as raw data, this is interesting information to have. It provides a level of transparency so that we all know (somewhat) how the hardware stacks up to each other.
-
While I’m not going to say that the minute lag (if any that’s really detectable is there at all) isn’t going to affect gameplay (different players are affected by different degrees of anything: seat inclination, ambient room temperature, viewing angle to the TV, etc), I’m concerned that an increasing number of (losing) players are now going to have an excuse to blame their losses on; ie, their hardware. Obviously, we all want 0 latency (or as little as possible) on all of our gear on our entire setup; but with this data here, more and more people are going to jump the gun and start blaming their stick/PCB (whether it would be true or not) instead of possibly attributing their losses to lack of skill/practice/experience.
-
That being said, the data is out here no matter how anyone decides to interpret it. By that train of thought, for those who are really concerned about the “lag” that exists in their existing Mad Catz sticks and PS360+ PCBs, feel free to sell them to me for parts, and go on and buy some new sticks.
Alright, I agree that there should be a little more clarity. I’ll change it to “+0.00 ms” in my next update and maybe add a little blurb on the page about what that “+” means.
This.
-ud