phatty wrote:Your test was simple but there's no proof that actuation is occurring at the exact same time. Position of the finger seems to be the same, but there's no way to tell since they are in the air and 4 ms mind you is faster than trigger time in the olympics which is 10 ms.
First, welcome to Blur Busters!
Actually, I have something to say about that. It's apples versus bananas.
I paid a peer-reviewed researcher to do some research on eSports reaction times, and here's
Blur Busters Human Reflex Article
Now, I have further things to add.
(1) The "Pass-the-finish-line" Effect
An Olympics athlete still wins passing the finish line 2ms before his competitor, even if they don't know it until they see scoreboard. Two persons have the same reaction time. They start at the same time. They finish at the same time. It's a tie (which occured in the early 20th century until stopwatches and finish-line cameras became accurate enough to break ties). By the straightshoot math, assuming no variance in reaction time: If one person starts 2ms sooner because they heard the starting pistol 2ms sooner than their competitor, they'll win the race. Now reaction times do vary, but it still averages out over time. Now, the reaction time spread is extremely tight in eSports; Championship Player #1 through Player #4 may have a reaction-time spread of only 20ms apart, with many situations of reactions only mere milliseconds apart, often less than 4ms for certain kinds of stimuli, like turn-corner, see-each-other, shoot-simultaneously, the display with the less lag will be the statistical tiebreaker in equal-reaction. While tickrate granularity (e.g. 128tick CS:GO servers) muddies this, it still statistically averages over time, 4ms less lag in a display means 50% chance the frag event occurs in a earlier 1/128sec window. There's no way for a game to pre-handicap a player that has a less laggy display (of the same refresh rate), so a lower-lag display is a sure way to tilt tiebreaker reactiontimes into your favour in those eSports-tight reactiontime spreads. That's "Crossing The Finish Line Effect"!
CONCLUSION: You do not need to see/feel the millisecond to win the millisecond
(2) The Lag-Training Effect
At 4000 pixels/second, shooting 4ms later to a stimulus means 16 pixels overshoot. 4000(pixels/sec) / 1000(ms in a second) x 4(ms) = 16 pixels. You're always trained to a specific lag of a specific display, so when latency changes even by a mere 4ms, a seasoned player can definitely feel things are off -- they're making fewer long-distance hits, and wonder why, they can't feel the lag, they can't see the lag, they just score less because lag is not the same as the lag they pre-trained at. A flick-turn immediately followed by a frag, the screen horizontally pans at many thousands pixels per second. One screen width per second is 2000 pixels/sec on a 1080p display -- see
TestUFO Photo Example at 1920 pixels/sec. Look at that animation full screen on your 1080p monitor. That's slower than a turn left/right in a FPS shooter. Many eSports players shoot without stopping their turn. Many are trained to be able to precisely shoot while turning. It's like trying to shoot an archery arrow on a motorized horizontally-moving archery target. Now if you're doing reliable bulls eyes on a specific display. Then you switch to a display with 1ms more lag than your original display at 4000pix/sec, your arrow will hit an average of 4 pixels to the left of the bulls-eye region. The entire scattergraph shifts leftwards by 1ms worth of movement (8 pixels at 8000 pixels/sec, or 4 pixels at 4000 pixels/sec, or 2 pixels at 2000 pixels/sec). I have confirmed eSports players genuinely feel performance changes from the lag-training effect even if they cannot detect the lag change directly. Now, look, the average human have widely varying reaction times. But a pro player can have consistent reaction time precision. That are really tight (varies only 10ms-20ms from a specific stimuli). Now if the bellcurve of the reaction time precision is a tight 4ms spread, such elite seasoned players definitely feel misaiming problems from a 4ms lag change even if they cannot directly detect the lag change.
CONCLUSION: You do not need to see/feel the millisecond to feel your performance has improved/degraded from mere milliseconds lag changes
I haven't even gone into spinoff things of why milliseconds matters; some much more human-detectable -- such as frame visibility effects. 240Hz displays can display refresh cycles in only 4.166ms while 120Hz displays can display refresh cycles in 8.333ms. The difference between 120Hz and 240Hz is human visible. There can be different signal processing lag and other factors so the worst 240Hz display can be worse than the best 144Hz displays. But clearly, 1/120sec duration refresh cycles versus 1/240sec-duration refresh cycles, are clearly human-visible -- the time differential of 1/120sec and 1/240sec is only 4.1666ms! Yet nearly everyone can tell apart the motion clarity of the two in TestUFO -- and often competitive players notice this in ultra-high-framerate games.
That's only three or four nuances so far. I have more to go on.
Shall I keep going on why milliseconds matters here at Blur Busters? 
Sure they matter less for some, and more for others, but you have to dig the dozens to hundreds of other nuances of the milliseconds -- including direct & indirect benefits -- other than the nuance you're speaking off.
Most light scientific studies of players can't punch through all the noise of non-professional non-olympic reaction times. They often pull students off the street to play a game and record their reaction times. But the calculus changes when you recruit real seasoned eSports players (especially paid champions) and try to measure their reaction times more closely to a real olympics athletes. Surprising data starts to show up when Player A and Player B have near-glassfloor reaction time spreads AND fairly equally matched.
P.S. I am recruiting peer-reviewed researchers for additional study/research on these topics. We're revealing unexpected human-relevant surprises lurking in the humble millisecond -- whether it be GtG or MPRT or reaction times or lag -- Contact me [email protected]