I know this is shallow and anecdotal, but before I found this thread, I swore up and down my Madcatz SFxTK Fightstick Pro lagged SIGNIFICANTLY more than my Hori VX-SA I had. My brother and I both used to play SFIV mainly on PC and we would fight over the Hori because we were convinced it lagged less. Not because of anything we read, just because we felt it. This seemed to carry over to 360 when we played Ultra (due to it coming out a while earlier on 360 over PC).
I know that this small amount of latency should be imperceivable, but I can say that even if it was just enough to push the lag over an extra frame, we could BOTH NOTICE. It was the difference between playing a game on a LCD as opposed to a CRT, The lag is there.
By the gods, some of you still think this garbage is accurate to the millisecond… then someone comes along and writes how to actually get the real raw inputs from the PCB and ya’ll want to argue about it. The fucking delusion in this thread is real. Anything to keep blaming your losses on anything but yourselves, right?
Advanced players will notice even a frame of delay right away. Problem is, there are a lot of casuals in this thread trying to derail and troll a good source of information.
Nothing wrong with being a casual, I used to be a casual back when I first picked up fighters. But people who don’t actually play at high level will not notice lag or input delay.
You can’t actually see or notice the actual lag, you only see the after effects of your timing is off due to that lag.
And its no where human’s perception of that after effect is as sensitive as you claim, maybe a whole frame and a half, if you are real good a one and one quarter frame.
Your eyes don’t notice the difference for at least 3 or 4 frames at best.
Top human reaction time for runners (this includes not just hearing the signal but getting up to run) floats over 100ms. Usian Bolt’s reaction time at the last Olympics was 0.146 seconds (he intentionally threw away 0.04 seconds), under Olympic rules a reaction time less than a 10th of a second counts as a false start. I highly doubt anyone at evo has better reaction times. Of course you would be slightly faster responding y with a button click than you are getting up to run.
The average reaction time for humans is 0.25 seconds to a visual stimulus, 0.17 for an audio stimulus, and 0.15 seconds for a touch stimulus. And that is just the lag your brain has to interpreting those electrical signals.
You want to subtract the microsecond lag for your display (at least 10ms or more) and about 30ms for your laptop/desktop’s OS.
Your results would be worst with a smart phone.
You ask how 1-frame links is possible then, you can’t see the frame coming you anticipate and try to predict what happens ahead of time.
Have a video playing with the frame count showing, not the FPS or refresh rate but the number of frames passed since the video start playing, just by spamming the pause/play button you can get it pause on the frame you want.
And if you want to hold Teyah’s results into consideration that 14.80ms for the PS4 VLX is in acceptable parameters as its still less than one frame.
I don’t know. I’ve stayed out of this for a pretty long time, but I think people who give a shit about finding out if their stick “lags” more than others is totally fair, and I give Teyah credit because he’s actually trying.
I personally - and don’t think a lot of other people curious of the information - don’t blame a laggy stick for losing. If I lose, it’s because I lost for whatever reason. But I genuinely want to know if there are any differences in the equipment for my own sake so I can make my OWN informed choice when I buy something.
Let’s use an analogy. Let’s say for example I want to buy a sports car, and I’m deciding between car A and car B. Both cars are fast, turn well, perform well on the track, and have great engines and motors - far better than your regular car for racing purposes. Wow, they both drive great! So either one of them would perform well in a race.
But wouldn’t you want to know how much horsepower there is at the crank? Or the wheels? That information isn’t published? Let’s run that shit on a dyno and try to find out ourselves so we can get informed to see if there are any real differences. Looks like someone found out car A is faster on a dyno but it hasn’t been thoroughly proven yet, but he’s sharing his results.
But - “MARIO ANDRETTI won every F1 race with car B, so clearly they both are fine and if you care about the differences, you’re pretty much wasting your time because your average person can’t tell the difference.” That’s what I’m hearing from this thread.
Who cares if a human theoretically can or can not tell a difference? Can a human tell a 1hp difference in a car? 10hp? I would still want to know.
I’m sure there could be better ways to get the data, but at least we’re trying, at least for the people who care. Again, I never blame my losses SOLELY to a stick that lags less than 14.8ms or whatever the hell it is, but it sounds to me on paper that there may be a difference and it is worth finding out more if you choose to.
And someone may say “well, his data could be wrong and he could be providing misinformation” - ok fair enough and that’s been spoken about enough already. People will have to use their own discretion with the data and make their own choices. But I don’t want to dismiss the fact that he may be on to something here and as a community we should be pushing this type of research further, not just drowning it out.
@Darksaul reaction time has absolutely nothing to do with noticing frame delay. Do you actually compete in fighting games in tournaments against real people?
I can hit 1-frame links on a laggy setup, but I will realize that the attacks are coming out late.
The problem arises in situations where you only have a 1 or 2-frame window to punish an attack. Or if you see your opponent whiff a normal and you have a chance to whiff punish. If you have a frame of delay you can miss that opportunity.
A stick that has 14.80ms of delay will sometimes have 1 frame of delay and sometimes 0 frames of delay. For example if you pressed the button 4ms into the current frame, the action will happen on the next frame instead of the current one.
Its more about human perception and how neurologically and psychologically you can’t actually precise those minute millisecond time intervals.
Yes I know about the theory how if a input falls into a frame of animation on Street Fighter’s game engine, but none of that is actually proven only speculated.
It impossible to prove one way or another without taking a real look at the game engine’s source code. There is also animation delay, where a particular animation starts you can’t input a new command until the animation is over. Some animation can be interrupted or “Canceled” which is how we got the concept of cancels.
I only half agree with you on this. Yes it can be beneficial to know which sticks is laggy, but there some issues that might arise.
One, a does your stick lag thread can create a problem of a “witch hunt” with people blaming their own performance on the stick over themselves.
Or people blaming everything from does a PS4 game controller has a touch pad to blaming an extra length of wire, terminals used, or anything else that wouldn’t effect the controller electrically.
The other being people will avoid looking at other equally important factors for a stick, including how reliable the PCB would operate, one of the PCBs with a great rating on this thread the Paewang is known for dying unexpectedly and with out warning.
There also been debunked that a laggy stick would cost someone a match using the real world win/lost results of actual players in tournaments.
Example many top players use the Mad Catz Pro sticks despite even before this thread its known that the stick has a significant amount of lag.
My big gripe is how is all the test data is represented as many people expressed how the testing procedure is not accurate enough for definitive microsecond timing.
There also an issue with the reference PCB used, it was never made clear how the PS360+ has a 0.0ms time.
Also how the community is interpreting or rather misinterpreting the data.
Also the absurdity that they can see less than 16ms of lag and claims they can feel a 1ms time differences in arcade sticks lag performance.
Momochi’s Razer stick dying during grand finals immediately comes to mind. I still have no idea exactly what happened, whether it was a dual-mod gone wrong or what…I’m still iffy on Razer sticks because of it.
Oddly enough my Paewang has held strong throughout years of use and being swapped into multiple sticks, and everyone I know that has an Omni has never had problems
I was about to order the Hori Real Arcade Pro Kai for PS3/PS4 until I saw someone mention that it has significant input lag. Just curious for those who use it, if it’s actually noticeable and if they’re happy with the purchase?
Noticing the input lag is rather beside the point, IMO: players are affected regardless of their awareness. Many input windows for links are only 1-3 frames long, making the issue bigger.
I know the times measured by Teyah are averages and are relative to the fastest measured PCB, i.e., they’re not absolute times, but consider this:
The player can send inputs at any time during each frame. i.e., at any point in the [0 ms; 16.6667 ms) window.
Assume a controller PCB takes 15 ms to send input from the player. Then unless the player is in the first 1.6666 ms, the input cannot reach the destination (the PC/console) in time (before the next frame starts). There’s also the USB polling rate, but let’s ignore it for this exercise (e.g., assume it’s factored in the PCB lag). This means there is a 15 / 16.6667 = 0.8999 ~= 90% chance for the input to take an extra frame before the game can use it.
Assume a PCB that takes 2 ms to send input. From the same reasoning, 2 / 16.6667 = 0.1199, i.e., there’s only a ~12% chance of the input not making it in time until the next frame.
I realize there may be other factors introducing lag, but I haven’t found a fault that could invalidate this reasoning. I’d appreciate it if someone could show it to me.
For the record, I appreciate Teyah’s effort, and it would be a shame if he got fed up with being discredited and decided to stop doing or take down the tests.
You know that people are not expressing those kinds of sentiments here, right? The new touchpad-including Horis are laggier because of a different PCB, not the touchpad itself. Hell, the DualShock 4 has a touchpad and is one of the fastest tested controllers for the PS4. The touchpad on the Horis is just an indicator of which PCB the stick has.
No one’s saying it is remotely close to the primary cause of match losses - I can see a laggy stick losing you a game, sometimes. The main point is that it’s not good to saddle yourself with extra lag, whether you can tell it or not. If you have a faster stick, your reactions will come out faster, period, and there’s absolutely no reason not to buy the fastest stick that meets your needs. You’re doing yourself a disservice otherwise.
Of course it shouldn’t be the primary criterion - the build of the body, connectors, PCBs tendency to die too often for your comfort, they all matter. No one’s pretending otherwise. You’re just on a crusade to stop people from even talking about these things because other things are more important to you. Newsflash: This is a thread about lag. There are other threads about those other aspects. This thread is about lag, so we might as well talk about lag.
Also, your explanation of how the lag shouldn’t matter because you can’t see it, especially not in realtime:
It affects the playfeel.
You have a faster stick, your reactions come out faster than on a slower one, period. It doesn’t mean you react faster, you just have a better shot at the punish window or of making the confirm.
You can tell afterwards, especially if it’s a lot - 1 frame or so I know I can’t tell except by playing the two sticks side by side, but it does alter the feeling of playing.
This is just you being fucking bullheaded because you honestly don’t understand the method (that is, you don’t seem to understand why it is actually capable of producing accurate results, not that you don’t understand the steps done) despite claiming to. First, it doesn’t give “definitive” anything in an absolutely absolute sense: This is statistics. We’re highly certain the distribution of our inputs is how we’d like it to because of the volume of presses, but there’s a small chance that it’s something different by dumb luck. A tiny chance, but a real one.
The PS360+ is listed at 0.00ms because it’s the reference PCB for that system. All Teyah’s list does is says “this PCB is the fastest one on this system. Here’s how much these other PCBs are behind the fastest measured PCB”. It doesn’t ever claim that the reference board is lagless. It’s just the fastest on that specific system and others get measured against it.
People misinterpreting the data is an issue solved by education, not telling them to not talk about it.
Do you have quotes to back this up, because it sounds absurd.
It’s not horrendous - about 1 frame behind the fastest you can get. I wouldn’t go much below, but if it fills your other needs I don’t see much reason to worry. If you can buy another faster stick that fills your needs and your budget can take it, I’d do so, but other needs come before that amount of lag.
I don’t see how reaction times have anything to do with this. I know that my old Hori (now broken) felt “crisper” and more direct than the Fightstick Pro. I didn’t need some test or anyone telling me that one lagged more than the other, I felt it.
would I win more because of it? Who knows, that doesn’t matter to me. What matters is how the game feels to me. I enjoy mechanically solid games that feel good to play. I grew up playing Quake on CRT monitors with lagless ps/2 mice and arcade games with hardwired lagless controls. I didn’t know this back then, but growing up, switching to low-poll-rate mice and using LCDs, things didn’t “feel” right anymore. Somehow, games felt indirect and more like I was suggesting movements to my character, rather than directly controlling them.
As display lag became addressed more and more over the past 7 or so years, that hasn’t been such an issue with me. But that Fightstick pro, and my brothers PS3 OG small SF4 fight stick, both have that slight indirect feeling compared to say, my old hori or even using my PS4 controller (on PC) and I think it’s particularly intriguing to me that THIS CHART DIRECTLY ALIGNS WITH WHAT I ALREADY FELT BEFORE I EVEN KNEW SOMEONE WAS DOING LAG TESTS ON THESE THINGS.
I’m not claiming to be the fighting game rainman input lag savant or something, I just think that human reaction times probably aren’t the correct measurement to use for this sort of thing. The length of time you react to a change =/= that you can perceive a change in the first place.
If it realy didn’t matter, as you say, recording studios wouldn’t bother with direct monitoring artists to avoid the 12ms delay most modern interfaces have when recording. It is well known that that sort of delay can severely hurt the artists performance, Because they do not “feel” directly connected with their instrument and their performance suffers because of it.
This is the other reason I think this thread needs to go. You (or most of the threads supporters) at no point try to look at this objectively.
People on this thread takes constructive criticism with hostility instead of objectivity. If you want to do this scientifically you have to approach this without any bias.
I know going in with zero bias is difficult, real world scientists do this all the time and admit this, hence the need to peer evaluation and other people to repeat the procedure it self.
Part of the problem here is no one else wants to spend the time and effort to repeat Teyah’s testing and compare his results with theirs. I would practically fall asleep before I am halfway done testing one stick.
And for that alone Teyah does deserve alot of respect for, as this is a epic undertaking for one person to take on. I personally have nothing against Teyah as a individual, a perhaps under difference circumstances we probity get along.
I based my arguments against this thread with people blaming touch pads or what ever for lag comes from the very dialog of this thread and other threads all over Tech Talk. I not going to go over and point out every citation as they are too numerous and wide spread for me to list. And when someone else does a lag test @jonyfraze for example people automatically reject it as its not “Teyah’s results”.
I also understand the testing procedure just fine, you line up two sticks side by side, wire up Low punch on both to a single button or switch, start up a game like Street Fighter, get two of the same characters in practice mode and have both characters try to punch each other and record the results. Who hit who first or do they collide and cancel each other. You do this a whole bunch of times (toodles did this approx 50 times teyah did it 1000 times), then you flip the controllers around and repeat the process. Then you take the average of these tests. I am fine reading the raw data from these testing as results. What I really disagree with is these results being represented as Milliseconds.
The only truly accurate way to get actual time results is to look at whats going on on the board on the logic level, you need a logic probe and a oscilloscope, the oscilloscope will display any and all data activity being picked up by the probe and shows in real time all the data packets being sent and received by the controller’s PCB. You want to logic probe both the USB input/output as well as your arcade push buttons and even the joystick.
The oscilloscope will pick up when the button is pressed in real time more accurately than the LED-set up and you compare that to the changes in data packets. The time it takes from the button press to the change in data packets is what we all are looking for. The problem is who has the resources to have a professional electronics lab testing facility?
I base this on numerous medical and psychological studies. I posted a link to a scientific journal somewhere in one of the previous pages of this thread.
You seem to assume people invariably take the measured times as absolute. Other people and I understand that they are relative to the fastest PCB. If you’d prefer to face the subject as competition among products, so be it: I’d rather have the fastest PCB and have my inputs reach the destination as soon as physically possible to minimize the chances of my inputs unnecessarily taking an additional frame to be processed.
Given a crazy number of tests, Teyah’s methodology is valid and provides worthwhile results (you’d have one hell of a time trying to soundly contradict them, e.g., putting a 15-ms PCB against the fastest for a given platform).