Chief Blur Buster wrote:niftucal wrote:There's also a pending optimization to improve latency with v-sync disabled but I didn't consider it important since it's minor (a few ms at most). Options specific to latency are planned but will require more knowledge from users to apply properly and are meant for specific use cases.
Oh yeah!
You'd be surprised how important it is to respect the unexpected millisecond.
Not important to everyone, but it's something meritworthy of open mind.
I've even commissioned an article by a peer reviewed researcher on eSports-league reaction times (
Input Lag and the Limits of Human Reflex). The millisecond is often easy to dismiss, but there's a few effects behind the millisecond too, that are often easier to understand for laypeople.
To me, a millisecond usually doesn't matter in my fun casual competitive play. But I've learned to keep an open mind about the importance of the millisecond here at Blur Busters.
The Cross-The-Finish-Line Effect. You don't need to feel the millisecond to benefit from the millisecond. Basically the Olympics 100 meter sprint finishers can be just milliseconds apart. Likewise, this situation happens often in a "both see, react, frag" simultaneous situations, like seeing each other at the same time and shooting at the same time -- that's what I call the "cross-the-finish-line" effect. With pro players, playing off each other, their reaction times are so tightly coupled that the lag difference between two can determine the frag. When Person X and Person Y both average the same reaction time, even a 5ms difference actually statistically matters to that particular professional player pairing. Reaction times often have really tight spreads. This can still persist with millisecond differences smaller than the tick interval. Because it is more likely to roundoff to the previous tick, especially in LAN or low-lag play where network lag becomes less dominant (Oh, and Blur Busters also has a
network lag article here submitted by Battle(non)sense).
The Lag-Training Effect. You're often pretrained for a specific lag. Basically aiming at a moving target. Say, archery shoot at a 1000 pixels/second moving target. Or FPS turning 1000 pixels/second shooting without stopping turn. Expert players who has the uncanny capability of shooting without pausing your turn (ala shooting while continuously turning). A 5ms lag increase/decrease means an overshoot/undershoot of your aim by 5 pixels. Now if target was moving 5000 pixels/second, you now have an average 25 pixel overshoot/undershoot of your aim. This persists until you retrain towards the new lag. You don't have to feel the millisecond to notice your aiming feels wrong or statistically off from the sudden change in lag.
The Eye-Hand Coordination Effect. This mainly affects touchscreens, but can also affect virtual reality (e.g. Rift, Vive) and other situations where sync between motion and reaction is much more tightly coupled. See
Microsoft Research 1000Hz touchscreen video where the milliseconds actually improves the sync. Imagine your finger sliding 1000 millimeters per second along a touchscreen, a 16ms lag means your screen cursor will follow 16 millimeters behind your finger. Certain kinds of Windows 10 touchscreen game could benefit from lag reductions.
There are other reasons why shaving milliseconds off is quite useful and important for various other roundabout reasons. And in
non-lag contexts too we play with milliseconds that ends up unexpectedly generating human-visible effects (e.g. strobe backlights flash length, MPRTs, our 480Hz monitor test, mouse pointer phantom array effects, etc). The bottom line, is we've learned to "respect thy millisecond" and keep an open mind.
It's amazing how many surprises lurk beneath the humble millisecond!
