How much does your arcade stick lag? Arcade stick input lag testing & results thread

[Landonio]

Apologies if this has been asked/discussed, but I really don’t feel like sifting through pages/threads to find my answer. But what is the absolute BEST fightpad out there to use for SFV? Do I even need to waste my time since apparently most of them have more input lag than a standard DS4 (allegedly)?

Also, is the CronusMax a complete waste?

[dehumanizer]

Apologies if this has been asked/discussed, but I really don’t feel like sifting through pages/threads to find my answer. But what is the absolute BEST fightpad out there to use for SFV? Do I even need to waste my time since apparently most of them have more input lag than a standard DS4 (allegedly)?

Also, is the CronusMax a complete waste?

The general consensus among most of the posters is that this thread should be taken with a grain of salt. There are too many variables in Teyah’s testing to prove definitively that one pad lags more than another. Along with that, it’s very hard to notice a frame of lag in a game. For example, it would not make sense to buy a hori vlx premium and switch out the guts for something that was deemed less laggy in this thread since it would a) not make sense financially and b) is not definitive.

TLDR don’t waste your time on trying to find a difference.

[Darksakul]

Apologies if this has been asked/discussed, but I really don’t feel like sifting through pages/threads to find my answer. But what is the absolute BEST fightpad out there to use for SFV? Do I even need to waste my time since apparently most of them have more input lag than a standard DS4 (allegedly)?

Also, is the CronusMax a complete waste?

But what is the absolute BEST fightpad out there to use for SFV?
New Hori Fighting Commander

Also, is the CronusMax a complete waste?
Banned at most tournaments plus a host of all kinds of issues

[Komatik]

Apologies if this has been asked/discussed, but I really don’t feel like sifting through pages/threads to find my answer. But what is the absolute BEST fightpad out there to use for SFV? Do I even need to waste my time since apparently most of them have more input lag than a standard DS4 (allegedly)?

Also, is the CronusMax a complete waste?

The ones on the market are so close to being as fast as possible that you shouldn’t worry. Just figure out what pad’s build suits your needs (I like my six face buttons) and buy that.

CronusMax is banned at tournaments, so there’s that. Brook converters are approved as far as I know.

[Teyah]

I’ve done some of my own testing. One question i need answering.In ps4 gg xrd: How come one pcb did better getting counters when testing kick at face to face, but if I moved the characters back a bit the other pcb had more counter hits.
And more so, at a very far distance I could spam kick and they would cancel each other, like a tech throw? Like I could do it for 100 times a row with no winner.

Short answer: Hitboxes and hurtboxes, you want to be doing the move at point blank so that both characters’ active frames hit each others’ hurtboxes. If you space the characters out, you introduce extended hurtboxes where the slower character could potentially win out depending on which normals you’re testing on. Moving farther yet, because GG generally has stronger hitboxes than a game like SF4, you’ll end up just getting clashes (the lightning spark effect) since both hurtboxes are too far away to be hit.

There are also some normals that immediately shift the character’s hurtbox, as well as situations where the character’s idle hurtbox changes depending on what animation frame they’re in. I run all my tests with Sol (who doesn’t have these kinds of problems) instead of say, Millia, who has a changing hurtbox and is very thin, which really messes with getting some moves to connect on her in a consistent way. Sol is large and he just stands there in his idle pose, and his hitboxes are all pretty nice and big too, so he’s the ideal test dummy.

Also regarding why I only test GG. It really helps to have a strong understanding of the game you are testing, which is why I used Guilty Gear. I’ve been playing the series since 2003 and know the engine inside and out and how it’s changed from XX to Xrd. I wouldn’t feel as confident with my results if I used a game I’m less familiar with.

[Teyah]

So… there’s a big update coming early next week for some newer PCBs and sticks. Results for CronusMax Plus, Brooks Converter & PCB, and Mad Catz TE-S+ and TE2+ should all be out soon.

And sorry to do this, but for the sake of any readers out there I should probably respond to this guy again.

This thread isn’t about science any more, its people taking some incomplete data and basing there purchases off one persons test results that could be and is completely wrong.
It’s like the anti-vaccine crowd in microcosm, the only difference is we aren’t putting peoples lives at risk with bad, incorrect infomation. It’s also why there been less testing in the topic.

Its just isn’t the millisecond results, its also the arbitrarily chosen 0ms boards, the letter grades that goes down to M. The lack of explanation.

You haven’t raised any new points that myself and others haven’t already addressed earlier in this thread, so honestly there is nothing further to explain. I don’t really care to discuss my methods for averaging with you for the 9th time. We already had this discussion and a professional statistician already vouched that the methodology for calculating lag is legitimate. See these posts if you would like a refresher:

Hey guys, this is an interesting discussion. I’ve been doing some statistics lately in my day job, so I figured I can comment on these experiments. I took a look at your excel spreadsheet, Teyah, and for the most part I think what you’ve done is not bad. A couple of points I wanted to make: The data is collected in terms of frames, but we can actually represent the data in terms of “relative” lag in milliseconds correctly. The fact that the data is discrete (-1, 0, 1, 2 frames of lag), do…

I completely agree with this. I don’t play fighting games that much these days, but I play shmups and other arcade games. Input lag is very important to the experience even when it’s 1P versus the CPU when reaction and timing are critical. There aren’t likely to be large deviations in the values being collected since Teyah is collecting frame data, 0 frames (tie), +1, +2, -1, etc. In this case, the %RSD is not relevant since he is observing the different animations by hand to assign the fr…

The testing method is valid, Darksakul. I’m a computational scientist (PhD in engineering and postdoc in mathematics). Even though the data is binned into discrete frame increments, a distribution is fit to the data. The distribution is continuous and you can estimate the mean of this continuous distribution. At this point the conversion to ms is meaningful and straightforward since it is a fixed 60 fps game.

Pretty much every other point you keep bringing up can be explained by reading the overview: http://www.teyah.net/sticklag/overview.html

And there’s been less testing/posting in the topic because there’s been less to test. Believe it or not, I actually do have better things to do than to come around here and explain the same point to you on a weekly basis.

[Moonchilde]

The ones on the market are so close to being as fast as possible that you shouldn’t worry.

How do you know? Did you test? Why is it ok to tell people this when it comes to pads, but not sticks??

[Darksakul]

a professional statistician

Laughs

Anyone can claim to be a “professional”, and professional only means you are paid for your work, it does not mean you are good at it.
Statistics are just the systematic sampling of a group, and time and time again professional statisticians are proven to be wrong.
You didn’t conduct a survey, you just compared random sticks to other random sticks, arbitrarily chosen a “test group” from your random comparisons and gave them all results that are more accurate that the testing procedures would allow.

Stats mean nothing without the understanding behind it. The size of the Sampling group, and you have to go in with no biases when searching for those results.

I don’t really care to discuss my methods for averaging with you for the 9th time

@Teyah I also told you 11 times now that your results are Bull Shit, how many time have to repeat myself?
I am not going to concede just because someone who claims to be a “professional statistician” says this is “scientific”.

Looking at your pays past posts, there a few problems there he refuse to look at.
The uncertainty of the in-game engine and we have no idea when in a frame a input occurs and at what point during that frame would a input would be taken or would that input be placed in the next frame.
All your results are in expressed in milliseconds where accurate millisecond results are impossible. Had this be a scientific journal instead of a internet web forum, you be laughed at and kicked out.

I tried not to make this personal, BUT your level of disdain the entire time makes it impossible to have academic debate.
Don’t make this into a flame war too, because short of moderator intervention I am not backing down from the issue.

[ShinMagus]

If over many tests a given PCB sends the input a frame later than the other and the opposite never happens, it cannot be considered noise. For me this is enough of a reason to consider one PCB faster than the other. How often this happens says how serious it is.

I don’t even need to care about the millisecond values themselves: a competition where PCBs are placed against each other and certain ones are verified to lag behind a percentage of the attempts is sufficiently interesting.

All of this only makes sense over a very large number of tests, a condition which Teyah certainly satisfies.

[Teyah]

Anyone can claim to be a “professional”, and professional only means you are paid for your work, it does not mean you are good at it.

That is indeed what the word “professional” means. No, it does not mean that he is good at it. The “PhD in engineering and postdoc in mathematics” strongly implies that, though.

@Teyah I also told you 11 times now that your results are Bull Shit, how many time have to repeat myself?

Hopefully not for a 12th time. Please follow my example and stop posting about the same topic over and over.

Looking at your pays past posts, there a few problems there he refuse to look at.
The uncertainty of the in-game engine and we have no idea when in a frame a input occurs and at what point during that frame would a input would be taken or would that input be placed in the next frame. All your results are in expressed in milliseconds where accurate millisecond results are impossible. Had this be a scientific journal instead of a internet web forum, you be laughed at and kicked out.

Well okay, for the 12th time then. That is exactly what he is looking at. He is not “refusing” to look at it, that’s the entire subject at hand. Your comprehension levels are the problem here, not the methods or the explanation of the guy with the PhD and post-doctorate. This is not a personal attack on you, this is simply stating what is happening here. It really looks like you are just not able to understand, so you think we’re skirting the issue.

The averaging is explained right here in the overview, which I guess, you are not able to understand. Hopefully other readers can follow this though:

However, it is important to note that for all intents and purposes, there is no way to determine where in the input window your input will fall. This is because there is no way for us to determine when the first frame ends and the next begins, as there are no tools or indicators that show at what point during the frame an input was pressed. Because of this, we can assume that each input that is tested falls within a ‘random’ position in the input polling frame.

Additionally, it is exactly this ‘randomness’ that allows us to see variances in stick input timings, since it is much more likely for there to be variances among sticks when both inputs (simultaneously pressed) fall towards the end of the polling window.

METHODOLOGY:

From the above you should see that we can only determine lag in 1 frame increments. However, what we can also determine is the frequency by which one stick lags over another. Since the placement of the inputs in the above 1 frame window is essentially random, we can take a large sample of inputs and average the results in order to determine approximately how much lag each stick PCB has.
In order to grind down to a meaningful number, at least a hundred trials are needed, and to be even more precise, several hundred. In most of my tests, I ran 1,000 trials, although some PCBs were limited to 500 due to time restraints.

http://teyah.net/sticklag/overview.html

[AhSniped]

Any word on the cronusmax PLUS input lag? Went down to the store to pick one up to play some friendlies , felt super good man. I was convinced there was not even one frame of lag. I was using the xbox360 hori real arcade Pro vx sa , judging by your work it shows my stick has no added lag to it. Looking for a word back, wanting to know if I should invest in a ps4 stick if the lag adds up to a te2 plus

[Teyah]

Any word on the cronusmax PLUS input lag? Went down to the store to pick one up to play some friendlies , felt super good man. I was convinced there was not even one frame of lag. I was using the xbox360 hori real arcade Pro vx sa , judging by your work it shows my stick has no added lag to it. Looking for a word back, wanting to know if I should invest in a ps4 stick if the lag adds up to a te2 plus

The CronusMax Plus is around 5 or 6 ms, really low for a PS4 converter. I wouldn’t worry about extra lag when using that to play on PS4.

The issue is moreso the lag on the sticks that you’d be running through the converter. Most of those would be 10 ms or higher, which is the standard for officially licensed PS3 sticks.

[AhSniped]

Any word on the cronusmax PLUS input lag? Went down to the store to pick one up to play some friendlies , felt super good man. I was convinced there was not even one frame of lag. I was using the xbox360 hori real arcade Pro vx sa , judging by your work it shows my stick has no added lag to it. Looking for a word back, wanting to know if I should invest in a ps4 stick if the lag adds up to a te2 plus

The CronusMax Plus is around 5 or 6 ms, really low for a PS4 converter. I wouldn’t worry about extra lag when using that to play on PS4.

The issue is moreso the lag on the sticks that you’d be running through the converter. Most of those would be 10 ms or higher, which is the standard for officially licensed PS3 sticks.

Awesome, thanks for the quick reply. Definitely keeping the converter , it was super cheap and convenient, felt really good to play on as well. As for anybody on the fence about buying it, go to best buy and give it a test, I was surprised how well it performed on my hori vx sa. You can return it before 15days at best buy if you have trouble with it

[Darksakul]

Any word on the cronusmax PLUS input lag? Went down to the store to pick one up to play some friendlies , felt super good man. I was convinced there was not even one frame of lag. I was using the xbox360 hori real arcade Pro vx sa , judging by your work it shows my stick has no added lag to it. Looking for a word back, wanting to know if I should invest in a ps4 stick if the lag adds up to a te2 plus

Even if it does not lag, with it’s host of other issues why risk using the Cronus?

[Moonchilde]

The CronusMax Plus is around 5 or 6 ms

Reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllly?? What are the testing methods?

/s

[Darksakul]

The CronusMax Plus is around 5 or 6 ms

Reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllly?? What are the testing methods?

/s

Same here, I like to know how he came to that conclusion.

I also like to know how does teyah know’s his "friend has a “PhD in engineering and postdoc in mathematics”?
For @jepjepjep where does your credentials come from, what school(s) did you get your diplomas?
And what kind of Engineering?

[Teyah]

I visit this thread once every few weeks. I find it enlightening/entertaining and useful all at the same time.

BTW, hope you guys have fun testing our new stuff. They all perform better based on the testing methods used in the OP.

Thanks MarkMan, I’m glad you found the results interesting and worth considering. I remember an old blog post of yours that said you were working on improving the latency of your sticks using a similar method, so it was nice to see that the right people put some work into this sort of thing as well.

On that note I’ve finished testing both the TE-S+ and TE2+ and it looks like the response time has improved significantly over previous Mad Catz sticks.

Quick and dirty results for the new MCZ sticks: TE2+ is about as fast as the Xrd pad (A+), TE-S+ is about as fast as the Hori pad (B-). I actually prefer the form factor and feel of the TE-S+ over the TE2+, so I’ll be playing on that instead (lag isn’t everything… surprised?)

Full results will be up soon on the site, when I get around to making new thumbnails and updating tables and other boring/time-consuming stuff.

[Komatik]

I bought a TE S+ because of the lag.

[Dubon]

Hmm. Why would the te-s+ and the te2+ have different pcbs? Announced at the same time, same turbopanel afaik.

[Vicko]

what gave you that impression