That has been how it has always worked. I genuinely believe most people either consciously or subconsciously try to "deny the truth" on the basis of not ruining their own casual or competitive mentality by saying that "these things do not matter or are negligible". Or, they genuinely can not actually notice the difference due to something I'll come back to later down this post (Latency Perception)Chief Blur Buster wrote: ↑11 Oct 2020, 16:09Here's a Secret...
Nobody knows they want an 8000 hz mouse. Yet.
It will hit the esports sphere first. But when 360 Hz monitors are cheaper in 2025, the 8000 Hz mouse will be a coveted accessory by then for users picky about smoothest motion. Getting money's worth out of 360Hz
I know not a single gamer out of the ~1000 gamers I have met, that would be fine with going back to a 60Hz monitor after their 120/144, let alone 240Hz. Yet it was only a few years ago where there was still arguments for how the impact and/or effect is not worth the effort(in this case, the price.)
With a sample size of 30 in the most unscientific way, I have also done an interesting test where the results has shown me:
If a player can notice 120Hz to 240Hz (or 60 to 120)
They are never able recalibrate to a lower standard at peak/close to peak performance - their performance (can) be semi-permanently affected in this scenario.
If a player however can NOT notice the instant effect of 60 to 120Hz or 120 to 240Hz, they are able to notice the change if they play on the new standard for a week then swap to lower Hz, however they are still able to recalibrate again to the lower Hz without being significantly affected.
However, (from limited unscientific sample) There has not been a single person to be capable of NOT noticing, as both groups has had the capability to notice/perceive changes if you gave them at least a week and then "downclocked" them.
Nowadays the argument stopped being "it's not a big difference" to "it's a negligible difference"
I.E 240hz to 360hz. From personal testing, Nvidia reported a raw 4% performance increase.
Here's the punch line; Sports research teams / performance specialists both legally and illegally has for YEARS and YEARS spent MILLIONS and MILLIONS for performance increases for game deciding differences of 0.3-1.5%
It is a bit frustrating to go in circles about this topic, as if there is no past documentation and history. But if there is one thing to learn from history, it is that we are very efficient at conveniently forgetting what is available to us and what we know from the past.
Lastly, a disclaimer: There are many, many variables to turn and improve before looking at top-end hardware and equipment/gear as the "problem". But it has always been baffling to ignore this once you are at a level where the investment cost easily justifies the reward. What is ~0.01% of an Esports Athletes salary for 4% performance increase? I honestly blame the top competitors more for not speaking out, for not raising awareness or for simply having poor understanding or bad(maybe it's good in this case?) latency perception. The environment and direction has always changed very fast once "influencers" and the like starts speaking about or using things. I do somewhat believe in a conspiracy that the current climate of Esports pros are people with relatively high "genetical" baseline thresholds of latency tolerance due to...Temporal ventriloquism and the Horizon of simultaneity.
I want to kick the door open very soon on a truly big and fascinating thing that I have been constantly thinking about the last year and a half, but I think it requires more context, proper formatting, strong research and deeper association for the "common folk" and a different variant for the scientifically educated, for it to have strong impact. However I'll try to leave as many breadcrumbs for people and create an open discussion around it and possibly inspire someone much more qualified than myself to research this.
Latency Perception, Temporal Ventriloquism & Horizon of Simultaneity in Esports
The absolute first article that opened my eyes to this (and is so far the only article to touch upon this subject for Gaming and Esports competition) was by a person named Eryk Banatt (Twitter here) who has a B.A in Cognitive Science. The article is called Delays Have Dangerous Ends: On Monitors in SSBM
This article was sparked due to the Super Smash Bros Melee community wanting to use monitors for accessibility and logistics reasons instead of their long-time precious CRTs. There was a lot of arguments about the monitors being "lagless" and "imperceiveable" from a CRT, thus the negligible performance difference did "not matter." Banatt tried to reason with the community about why this thinking is not as straight forward as it seems not only because of how impactful it can be to competitive performance differences. But also Latency Perception itself is a variable! (A few cannot speak for everyone and everyone cannot speak for the few.)
From this article, there are two paragraphs that are very interesting to explain a lot of the craziness at hand in our tasks here:
Eryk essentially hypothesizes that the same re-stitching effect we get from audio and visuals at different times are being synced, is the same concept to understand why lag is perceived differently by people. If a person is within the range of horizon of simultaneity (example numbers, 50-200ms) such as when a person speaks from a distance, the actual audio versus the visual aspect of the person moving their mouth are at two completely different intervals, yet we perceive it as real-time and happening at once due to "temporal ventriloquism". That is what the Horizon of simultaneity entails, as long as the audio/visuals infront of a person is within the limits/ranges of their own horizon of simultaneity, their brain will magically "sync" the audio and visual.
Now Eryk suggests that this concept can be further applied to inputlag (Tactile, Haptic / Visual / Audio) and why players notice it differently. Because there's a certain lag threshold needed for each player until they stop noticing that there is lag in whatever task they may be doing, regardless of if there actually STILL IS LAG. This is a pretty big a-ha moment, because it is the only possible way where someone successfully explained why there is a difference, without it being deemed a wild-goose hunt or mocking a person for making "excuses" for their performance at a LAN or Online event (even if that is the case!)
Imagine how many times you have heard of stories of a person being an "onliner" and can't perform at "LAN/Offline events" That they simply choke or can't handle the stress and pressure so their performance is worse, they need the comfort of their own home. The star AWPer who just could not perform when it mattered at offline events. Here's the deal, there will always be a case for this(people do not always have a consistent mental game or performance with high stakes) but I highly, highly suspect that there are more sinister causes for this. Often the players most likely have had setups that are slightly better than at the competition itself, especially in the past years. However, through my career as a person in the Esports industry (I am not special, I just have been fortunate enough to have a lot of contacts and been able to visit and live experience a lot of things for myself.) I have come to realize that the optimization level of pro players are very, very poor. They are not a strong empirical case for what is good and bad even if their skillset is supposed to be reflecting of this. Along with this, competitions themselves are often poorly optimized and consistently has ran with a "make it work for the average pro as a minimum" (yet the average pro does not completely know what is good or bad, just if THEY are feeling bad or good in the very specific moment.) I went through this in a post on here, you may go read it if you want; My experience in Esports as a bystander and competitor
There's many factors that can also make someone completely push through latency. One of them is by being completely engulfed in the moment where you force the game, your motions and everything including it to completely sync up aka; "the zone/flow state" The problem with this however is that to enter the zone or flow state, it has been hypothesized that you require a slight challenge (but not too much) while being 100% completely comfortable with your own movement/inputs/aiming without conscious thought on these aspects specifically(thinking about how you want to move, rather than just moving.) Our earlier talk about latency should essentially make that last task requirement, impossibly hard due to constantly fighting the perceived latency threshold in being able to "feel like you are one with the game." to enter flow state.
So to go back to our earlier point, this person that we have previously chalked up to being a choker essentially has now not been able to distinguish why he consistently keeps performing poorly at LAN even though he has never felt performance anxiety related symptoms in his life. One of his aspirations to even becoming good at games and participating in Esports was so that he could be on the stage more often and show people his ability! He will go back home, ridiculed. He cannot speak up, because it is simply an "excuse." He will work on himself on what the perceived problems are according to media or coaches that also perceive it to be the same. He will go back to the stage and he will try again. This time, either he has been able to calibrate to slightly worse LAN environments (through ever so slightly lowering the latency threshold for feeling latency by adaptation or calibration, by accident or as an incident.) Or he will yet again fail in the exact same way and be chalked down to not being able to perform on stage.
This has happened to me personally. This has most likely happened to several Pros in the history of Esports. However the problem is incredibly delicate, as we are in a new generation culture where we have not figured out many problems of our scenes at all, yet we constantly behave and make decisions for others as we have. Like I said, these players who are affected are not able to speak up about real problems without it being called an excuse due to the nature of competition. Even in the cases of something being an excuse, it does not necessarily mean it is not a problem!
I hope this poorly formatted and sloppy explanation that does not do Eryk justice, will however still just be enough to create a discussion around this as a reference point for the future. I would appreciate any and all comments on this as at the end of the day, I am simply just a player who wants to make the entire competitive scene in all Esports genres the best there can be for one sole reason; that everyone will be able to display their true ability/skill which in turn gives everyone else a better viewing experience and entertainment.
Lastly I will finish off with some aspects that can influence lag to push people under or above latency thresholds along with a ton of study excerpts with their respective links that both prove and disprove a few of my statements. Keep in mind that they are majorly not designed around low latency situations / for gaming purposes, which makes them faulty by nature for this.
Regarding the list itself, these are absurd amount of things to account for. I am not a person who chases unreasonable and not realistic scenarios however I do believe we have pushed that line a bit too far towards "not possible" when a lot is possible to alleviate. I personally propose a goal of attempting to lower latency and responsiveness variance to a latency threshold where the overwhelming majority will not be able to be strongly impacted by it. This would mean that even in the presence of lag, it is low enough to calibrate and push past it thanks to our incredible human brains. The goal is to simply get to the threshold where we are able to sync asynchronous actions for the overwhelming majority of players, casuals or competitors alike. The only aspect of this that is genuinely impossible is to try to do it alone or not start somewhere. I have been able to do it in my own community and game (Brawlhalla) but that is as far as I can personally change the landscape. I think 2020 and 2021 will show to be great times to finally talk about the "dark horse" or more "sinister but controllable aspects of Esports competition" and it seems like the market has been steering itself towards latency as well.
This list is not only for raw latency, but anything that can affect latency perception itself. It's pretty much just everything I can think off plus some inspiration from /R/Gamingoptimisations
Framepacing/Game Code/Game Optimization
High DPI vs low DPI (smoothing, no smoothing)
High Polling Rates vs Low Polling Rates (250hz vs 1000hz vs 8000hz vs XXXXX)
EMI / Power interference
RGB induced lag (heat & possible overhead)
Network lag, Bufferbloat, Peering, Routes, Packetloss etc
Refresh rates (60hz vs 120hz vs 240hz vs 360hz vs XXXhz
Monitor differences (Response times, Signal Processing, Cable used etc)
Computer Setup/OS Differences
Different "tweaks" and "optimizations" on software, hardware and OS
Computer Hardware
Cooling (as temperature fluctuations depending on the ranges can catalyst and cause variable lag)
Software
Computer Peripherals
Surface(Mouse pad)/Mouse feet/Mouse comfort/Cable/Sensor
Chair / Chair position
Sleep & Physical Performance State (glasses, sound)
Body Performance through Nutrients & Diet
Environment (Humidity, Lights, Stage, Noise, Oxygen levels/CO2)
Psychological/Mental state & Mentality (Meditation, Calibration attempts, Music {different genres and beats})
Disclaimer; a lot of the mentioned study links are not direct approvals nor disproval of the thread, they are merely interesting links between the concepts discussed regarding latency & latency perception. There are certain things to recognize in the temporal aspects of a human body & the possible links they have for Esports and latency.
NVIDIA's Main Research Publicization & Blog post on their studies regarding Latency & its effects
NVIDIA's blog post on reflex, their new innovation for latency, references & utilizes aforementioned research
(New post on Esports & Excercise, supplementary info)
Converging Evidence Supporting the Cognitive Link between Exercise and Esport Performance: A Dual Systematic Review
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Realigning Thunder and Lightning: Temporal Adaptation to Spatiotemporally Distant Events
Perceptual association enhances intersensory temporal precision
Rapid recalibration to audiovisual asynchrony follows the physical—not the perceived—temporal order
Contextualizing the clock(s) : integrating cues for the perception of time and timing an action
Audiovisual temporal recalibration occurs independently at two different time scales
Selective Attention Modulates the Direction of Audio-Visual Temporal Recalibration
Smoothness perception: Investigation of beat rate effect on frame rate perception
Perceptual Limits of Visual-Haptic Simultaneity in Virtual Reality Interactions
Grouping and Segregation of Sensory Events by Actions in Temporal Audio-Visual Recalibration
Sensitivity to Audiovisual Temporal Asynchrony in Children With a History of Specific Language Impairment and Their Peers With Typical Development: A Replication and Follow-Up Study
What Causes Specific Language Impairment in Children?