Why do [some] 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

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lulded
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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by lulded » 02 May 2018, 19:09

romkkaa wrote:I have the same experience as hkngo007
Played first person shooters for 2 days switching between Predator XB271HU and Alienware AW2518H and I felt like I'm faster on the predator (faster aim, faster reaction time, spotting enemies quicker) despite the lower framerate cap (162 and 235 respectively). Planning to return the alienware back to the store tomorrow as I'm very disappointed in it. 240 Hz is a marketing trick, nothing more. Yes, motion clarity is better on the alienware but overall experience is bad.
I don't understand the mumbo jumbo of monitor intricacies, but I personally think its a side effect of the screen delay and the input lag being relatively lower. I m a former masters/grandmaster overwatch player and when I played on a VG248QE, the game felt better with the reduced buffering option to off.

Reduced buffering ON in that game feels like it has the same effect as the AW2518h with it "off". the cursor feels a lot more tight and harder to manipulate with wrist motion. The only solutions I've come up with are one of the 3:

-using a higher DPI
-Raising in game sensitivity
-Lowering mouse polling rate.

The higher DPI (1600 in my case) feels like the cursor moves a lot faster kinda similar to 800 on my VG248, but its harder to control than my former setting.
Raising in game sensitivity works, but my tracking isn't as good as it used to be because I'm used to using both arm and wrist motion.
Lowering polling rate feels a lot more "crisp", but 1000hz has its own unique feel and it isn't the same kind of tracking.

I kinda agree with your opinions of faster aim and reaction not being as good, but I just have this strong feeling that its kind of like an inverse effect. It would be nice to really look into this from a high elo/psychological aspect, but most people just grind it out and kinda ignore the technicalities as gamers.

Hell I used to play on a dual core skylake CPU and my tracking felt a lot better than with my newer 7700k. Maybe i'm just weird and prefer more lag :D

Edit: The mouse community also had a similar issue with newer gen logitech mice feeling subjectively more "laggy". But the mice themselves are likely just faster than every other competitive model on the market. We may have reached a point where input lag is just ironically too low.

That or the input lag cuts over the refresh value of 4.1ms and the side effect is just amplified due to refresh rate. I don't really know.
Last edited by lulded on 03 May 2018, 07:46, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 03 May 2018, 02:16

Thanks for writing!
lulded wrote:That or the input lag cuts over the refresh value of 4.1ms and the side effect is just amplified due to refresh rate. I don't really know.
I'm pretty interested in more detailed analysis on some of the phenomenae that make-or-break 144Hz versus 240Hz. Some of it all is extremely hard to test for, while others are much easier to explain.
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lulded
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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by lulded » 03 May 2018, 08:08

Yeah, no problem.

Like I said, I feel similar latency differences with Overwatch's in game "reduced buffering" option. Enabling the setting pretty much has the same kind of "lag" feel, but its obviously not "lag" as my left to right arm movement is crisper. For me its my wrist tracking that really screws me over. The best way I can explain it is that the cursor feels a lot more narrow in terms of aiming movement. This is the same kind of transition I felt between VG248QE and A2518H for basic 2D motion.

Lets assume input lag is indeed sub 4ms. That's still ~3 or so ms faster than my old 144hz (6.9ms) monitor in terms of visual representation on screen.

Like I said, I might just prefer aiming with lag. Going from an older AMD card to a Nvidia 970 in 2015 had the same kind of feel as I explained above. Hence, I rather believe theres nothing wrong with the Alienware, but It may just be a preference for more "lag"

Dropping the polling works like I said, but the cursor path changes regardless of purposely increasing input latency, 1000hz is still 1000hz. Latency would have to increase on a sensor level for me to feel comfortable probably.

Increasing DPI is just the easiest solution I believe.

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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by jorimt » 05 May 2018, 22:21

lulded wrote:Like I said, I might just prefer aiming with lag.
To back you up a little from my personal subjective experience, at least in regards to the broader subject of ultra low input lag vs. higher input lag, I surprisingly found it more difficult to perform my G-SYNC input lag tests during the 2000+ fps V-SYNC OFF scenario (240Hz) in CS:GO.

The on-screen reaction (white square moving across black space) to my clicks was so fast, it's almost like how you can't speak when you hear your own voice repeated back to you in real time at a certain delay, and I found myself mis-clicking, running out of screen space, and having to start over when directly compared to the under <1000 fps scenarios and/or lower Hz (of which I also found to be a similar case with low Hz V-SYNC ON as well).

And my average visual reaction time is <180ms (counting device/computer/display lag), so it's not like I'm a super slow reactor either.

I'm assuming most of us are so conditioned to some lag, that when most of it taken away, it reveals our conditioning to it. I'm certain if I experienced such low lag on all the devices I use regularly (if such a thing were currently possible), I would acclimate just fine, and the sensation between the scenarios would reverse; if you give it time, the brain can adapt to pretty much anything, for better or for worse.
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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by lexlazootin » 05 May 2018, 22:57

Speaking of reaction times i made a little App a while ago in Love2d to more accurately test for it.

https://i.imgur.com/woEy0aE.png

It's much better then the web app click based tests that have to deal with desktop v-sync because it runs in exclusive fullscreen and at 600fps+ It's obviously not the best it could possibly be but it's good enough.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/s74dhvhdw ... chmark.zip

Just drag the reactiontest folder onto love2d and it will run, i tend to get 40ms~ lower then anything online.

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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by jorimt » 07 May 2018, 09:29

Neat, I got as low as 147ms with that app, but that was at 500 FPS; the framerate won't seem to go over that for some reason (144Hz, v-sync off). Single-threaded/CPU-limited I assume?
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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by lexlazootin » 07 May 2018, 11:31

I really have no idea, it's very easy to make a small app with Love2d and i'm not really a coder but you can piece it together with tape if you try hard enough so i actually don't know what's going on. But i would it's some sort of silly bottleneck. I wasn't able to get it much higher. But i do imagine that it uses 1 core and my slightly higher clocked i5 4.5gh would get a little higher.

It would be much better if someone made a app like this in DX or Opengl so it can be drawn at a much higher frame rate. I remember Flood had a app that run at a few thousand fps that would change the color of the screen to black as soon as it detected mouse movement, but i think he's long gone :P

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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by jorimt » 07 May 2018, 17:50

Still shows how comparatively useless tests like Human Benchmark are at measuring true reaction time; you can get an idea of your average drift, but not your true average or minimums with those.
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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 08 May 2018, 08:06

I suspect that it's also a very human dependent factor.

Some people are just naturals -- they can speak into anything, even with lagged audio playing back at them -- or require dramatically different lag in order to interefere with their speaking.

Driving games do feel better with a slight amount of lag in steering -- otherwise you just oversteer back and fourth if a car is way too responsive.
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Re: Why do 240HZ monitors have more lag than 144HZ AHVA

Post by lexlazootin » 09 May 2018, 04:41

Chief Blur Buster wrote:Some people are just naturals -- they can speak into anything, even with lagged audio playing back at them -- or require dramatically different lag in order to interefere with their speaking.
:lol: That line is super confusing if they don't know what you're talking about. You're talking about a speech jammer, it plays your voice back to you and it makes it very difficult to talk.

I've always wondered personally why some people are better certain tasks. What makes people better or worse at reaction tests? is it GeNeTiCs or is it that people can better mentally prepare, or are more mentally prepared for it? I would like to think we are just trained for it.

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