We’re still waiting on results from someone who can test them.
Most people have claimed anecdotally that there is negligible difference. We won’t have numbers until someone can actually sit down with a stopwatch and test it out. How “accurate” is the RB test?
Can someone help me with this? I have a friend who just got this tv: http://www.funai.eu/produkt-lh850-m19-41.html
From what you can see in the Picture Adjustment Options, what can they do to reduce as much lag as possible with it? Thank you.
Why is it that HDTV’s have that disgusting delay?
It makes all fighting games not even worth playing at all. Do you guys have problems with HDTV lag still?
I mean it’s terrible… there is almost like 1 whole second delay. Does anyone here use the older CRT TVs instead?
I’m pretty sure everyone uses asus evo monitor at home for fighting games
The fact of the matter is that input latency is a non-priority for manufacturers. The main market for TV’s is people who just watch TV’s; all input lag does is add a negligible delay on to of their already-slow-as-molasses set-top-box interface – as long as the audio matches the video, ignorance is bliss. Even most gamers don’t recognize how sluggish their TV’s are, because they’re just used to them. It only really matters for a small subset of gamers (basically the FGC and other competitive scenes), and we’re such a small piece that there’s no reason to spend the extra money to engineer a low latency solution – in fact, they can get away with putting cheaper parts in all of their sets this way, which FAR outweighs any lost sales to people like us. It’s just the nature of the business.
Luckily, Asus has seen fit to bless us with the EVO monitor which, likely by dumb luck, has great performance in this respect at a reasonable price and thus became the gold standard for FG players. TT also has a wonderful thread compiling low-input latency monitors, if the Asus doesn’t fit your needs.
As motion controls become more prevalent, it’s possible that more people will become sensitized to this lag, which could lead to companies focusing more on this aspect of their monitors’ performance… but I honestly wouldn’t hold my breath.
Sadly ASUS do not sell those monitors in every country, so a lot of people are flying blind when they are going to buy tvs/monitors. here in Brazil thats how it works, the models being sold here arent the same as in the USA and Europe, so we keep guessing, and even when we guess right we still have to deal with some delay. Panasonic is the brand with better response tive over here, all theirs models have the same response time and thats good because sometimes you go to buy a TV from Samsung because you played on a Samsung at your friend’s house and noticed almost no lag, them you buy your Samsung and its crappy. Even the Panasonics beeing good overall, they still have around 32ms of delay compared with a CRT monitor, and you feel it, when you play a tournament with CRT TVs.
Nearly all of my gaming is done on a late 90s CRT Trinitron. I play mostly shmups and arcade style games where lag doesn’t fly. Good quality CRTs are usually around $20 or free in my area. That beats hunting down a lagless HD display.
Please keep in mind 99.99% of HD Television sets are not built with any sort of gaming in mind.
HD TVs are made primary for Over the Air TV, Cable TV, DVD and Blu Ray play back and net enabled services (Hulu, Netflix, You Tube, ect).
Gaming is the last thing most TV manufacturers ever think about
It is actually sad how uninformed the public is over Digital TV, and how little the Retail market is willing to educate the consumer.
Standard Definition SD: 480i (or less as in the case for older CRT TVs)
Enhanced Definition ED: 480p
High Definition HD: 720i, 720p, 1080i, 1080p
Keep in mind Until recently game systems only out put at 240i
That is everything from the Atari 2600 to the PS2 and OG Xbox
(yes there are ways to get last gen consoles to display at 480p)
To the statements about Response time I quote poonage
For “lagless” or sub 1 frame lag HD TVs try the
The New Definitive HDTV Lag FAQ
Not true. Starting in the 16-bit era, while not spitting out true 480i due to being able to cheat resolution due to stupid overscan, most home consoles were pretty close to max standard def res. Some companies like Sega used very bizarre frame maps and resolutions but the end result was close to 480i. Most systems can internally render lower resolutions and upscale on the fly to get to standard def compatibility and a lot of games did (especially for the N64 and PS1 and even on todays systems), but that doesn’t mean they were limited to 240i.
according to most sources, 720i is an error and there isn’t really a 720i standard.
HDTVs still lag now, and will continue to lag in the future, because picture quality is more important to manufacturers than display latency. In fact I expect HDTVs to lag even more in the future as additional post-processing is performed on video to improve image quality. I’ve been saying this for a while, but the true solution to input lag problems is not for HDTV manufacturers to make lagless HDTVs and the ISPs to overhaul their infrastructure. It’s for FG developers to make games that are more lenient in their inputs and more tolerant of lag in general.
That’s sort of diametrically opposed to the precision and quick reaction-times inherent to the genre, really. Not saying that input windows can’t be widened for the sake of being latency-tolerant, just saying that that would change what we know as a fighting game pretty significantly.
Similar to how control schemes/input devices dictate optimal game design, latency-leniency does as well. When FPS’s came to consoles, none of them were good until the formula was rejiggered to reflect the limitations/strengths of the input devices. The games were slowed down, relative to the popular twitch PC games like Quake and UT, and you ended up with games like Halo and Gears. Not implying any sort of judgement on those games, but they highlighted the strengths of consoles and downplayed the weaknesses of playing on pad. When both of those series came to the PC, they felt very slow and deliberate relative to what PC gamers were used to (though still quite fun) – the game design had been shifted at a base level to optimize for the input device. You’re also seeing games made specifically for motion controls these days, or optimized for touch – each provides a set of strengths and weaknesses to be considered from the beginning of designing a game. Fighting games, meanwhile, are a little hard to adapt (in their “classic” form) to secondary control schemes. That’s why most people that play them seriously get a stick – while it’s not impossible to play seriously on pad, the general consensus is that it, at the very least, takes very skilled/dextrous fingers, and that stick players have a bit of a head start. If you want to see a fighting game that’s been redesigned to optimize pad play, look no further than the Smash Bros. series – incredibly fun games, but they’re very different because they’re designed to take advantage of pad features (analogue inputs), and expect the limited dexterity allowed by a pad, so they work around it with compensatory mechanisms (like the C-Stick for triggering smash moves, for instance).
Latency? Well, latency is pretty much purely a weakness. Not that games can’t (and haven’t) worked around it nicely – RPG’s are a great example of almost latency-agnostic gaming experiences. MMO’s doubly so: they’re designed for people to be able to play them on crap connections with crap computers, and still have fun, by focusing on a rhythm that can be established entirely on the client side (where there is little latency). And puzzle games, as a genre, are rarely affected at all by latency. The problem is that our genre (fighting games) is one that is very much about reactions – if you make it more tolerant of latent displays, you are slowing everything down; at that point, the person with the lower-latency display sees the game as having huge windows, while the person with the laggy display sees it as being tight. GGPO does a good job trying to account for network lag, but the nature of how our preferred games work ends up causing the jumping/rewinding that’s a bit jarring to people. It would take a complete re-prioritization of the game design of these games to make them truly latency-agnostic, and at that point you’re getting into “what makes a fighting game a fighting game” territory.
Not to mention if a display’s laggy, it is always going to bother me (and people like me), even if it’s just in menus. Just a pain.
I think that depends on how you look at it. Personally, I think that fighting games could stand to reduce the execution barrier for the sake of garnering a larger audience and improving the gameplay experience for those who can only play offline or on laggy sets. The strategy would still be there. The mix-ups, the footsies, all that would still be there. The only thing that would be lost is the enormous execution barrier that makes FGs so unattractive for someone new to the genre to pick up, and also makes our online play such a frustrating experience. Whatever your opinion, though, the fact remains that latency is a thing and as long as FG inputs are tight then FG online (and offline on HDTV) games will be ass.
It’s never going to be perfect, but that’s no reason not to try and make the experience be as good as it can be.
No doubt, I agree that there’s room for those other types of games (I think we already have many, to be honest)… but the execution barrier is simply part of the classic 2D fighting game model. I would argue, however, that without a challenging execution barrier to perform the most effective strategic maneuvers, there’s no risk/reward to it. If you can hit a certain one-frame link only, let’s say, 60% of the time, and hitting it means you win the match, but not hitting it means losing out on the (lesser) potential damage of a safer, easier combo follow-up, you have a choice – take the risk for the extra damage, or play it safe. Eliminating those types of risk/reward scenarios changes the style of gameplay a lot.
Not to bring in the whole E-Sports thing, but it’s actually fairly analogous to Brood War and StarCraft 2 – You look at the trends of post-Brood War RTS games, and many of them sought a lower execution barrier in favor of higher-level strategies – more advanced queuing of unit instructions, simplifications of economies, etc. Those games were drastically different from BW, and interesting in their own ways, as they didn’t rely as much on consistent, mid-to-high-APM to execute high level strategies. But then StarCraft 2 came out, and showed that while the other games had a similar level of depth and complexity, the high APM requirements of SC were still an interesting match for modern play. Players have to balance execution and multi-tasking with the overall strategies, mixing micro with macro, to find a golden balance that wins of opponents.
The fact that execution is part of the skillset needed to play these games well is defining to their style – it becomes just one area in which a player can excel. Someone who has worse execution might have better reactions, or better mind games, etc., and still win out over an execution god. It’s a part of the balance of a players’ skill, and adds depth to the game.
I agree, pragmatically, that latency is definitely a thing that’s not going away. But at the competitive level, it’s a thing we minimize (and always will) at every chance we get. Less latency will always feel better than more latency. The balance comes from making sure that you don’t degrade the low-latency experience by optimizing a game for high-latency players.
When execution and reactions aren’t a part of a fighting game, then latency won’t be a concern anymore – but then, will that be a fighting game we all still want to play?
I dunno about that. The execution barrier only really matters in the low-to-mid levels of play. When you get to a certain level it really doesn’t matter how difficult combos are. Take MVC2 for example. Initially a lot of players gravitated to easy characters like Iceman, but now everyone can pull off Magneto infinites and AHVBx3 like it’s nothing. I can TOD with Ironman infinite and guard-break tactics all day long, and I expect all of my serious opponents to have a similar level of mastery for whatever characters they are playing. The execution barrier was just a speed bump to lengthen the amount of time before everyone learned their shit and we could start playing the real game.
underwing is on point with everything he says and should be a primer on why HDTVs are the way they are right now. It’s quite simple: the technology to cut down on the latency costs money, and manufacturers are much more concerned with features that sell, like internet options, 3D (yuck), picture quality, etc…they would rather invest their time and money into those latter features.
Twitch play in gaming is getting to be more and more of an underground acquired taste, and I think that’s very unfortunate. :sad:
A friend of mine, even after I told him of this thread and HD digital signs, and despite not having cable (he doesn’t care for it), still wants to get an HDTV with some 120 Hz “smoothing” or something of the sort. He says “he notices” (which I’m skeptical about NOT ANYMORE SEE BELOW DON’T HATE ME DAVE) when watching movies and the like, and would rather just get a TV with a good game mode.
So what are modern “smoothing” options in HDTVs, and do HD digital signs offer them, and do they even matter?
I “notice” 120Hz smoothing too, it looks friggin’ awful IMHO. 
Most of the brands’ upper-tier models have it (Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, et al.). Digital signage displays won’t have it. To find a decent low-lag display it’s the same as anything else; gotta look up the specific model you are after and see if there are any results posted, or test it yourself.
The Panasonic VT30 I got this year has smoothing options and lags 1-2 frames with all the processing features turned off. Unfortunately it’s hard to recommend plasmas for heavy gaming, unless you don’t care about image retention and burn-in. It was getting better in the later 2D panels, but after re-engineering the PDPs for 3D, image retention has made a comeback.
Much thanks!
My buddy and I just had a “debate” on the merits of that smoothing, since I now know what it is and remember having seen it. He still wants it. /shrug
Thanks regardless for the info, from me and him.