I want to get as little input-to-display lag as possible on my PC. I've seen a few articles now that show that modern computers can have up to six times the input lag of old shitboxes like pic related. What all can I do to get my keyboard and mouse inputs to display on my monitor as fast as possible? I want to get a good PS/2 keyboard (as I read that PS/2 removes the latency added by usb drivers) and a good mouse, and hopefully a monitor that has a low latency too (I know non-crts don't have true 1ms). I'm not looking to use my pc as a workstation, so this is just for helping offset my awful reflexes in video games.
Computer Latency
Jaxson Cook
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Lucas Martinez
At this rate,you might want to do some lobotomy and plug all the peripheral connectors straight to your brain instead
Blake Evans
You cant tell the difference between 1ms and 10ms, just dont buy a piece of shit first gen lcd monitor and you'll be okay
Nathaniel Reed
The vast majority of input lag in games comes from the game itself or the graphics driver. Always disable VSync, if the game has any setting for pre-rendered frames set it to the minimum and/or do the same in your graphics driver settings. The monitor can also be a source of input lag, but keep in mind that response time and input lag are NOT the same thing. Input lag generally does not appear on monitor specifications, you have to find reviews which actually measure input lag.
Shit you get from peripherals is going to be incredibly minor compared to what you get from the rest of the chain until it actually pops up on the monitor, then there's extra network delay in MP games as well. If you really want you can use a PS/2 keyboard or just use USB peripherals with a 1000Hz polling rate. You're never going to notice the difference, though.
Isaac Ross
To get started with low latency gaming just use PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse and get a CRT with a VGA input. Set it to 640x480 at minimum 75hz. Higher is always better.
Xavier White
This is a meme though. USB polls much faster these days than PS/2 ever could. We are talking about magnitudes over 20 here.
Luke Murphy
The difference is that older computers had very few layers between pressing a key and its appearance on the screen. Now you've got so many layers passing the message between themselves that it takes much more time, despite the insanely high CPU speeds now compared to the approximately 1 MHz speeds of those ancient eight bit computers.
I don't know how to fix this. Either appreciate the massively better computer as of today, or turn your back on them and go back to something primitive.
Charles Mitchell
PS/2 doesn't poll at all, it's interrupt based. Not that it actually matters in practice, though.
Oliver Ross
Yes, you can. Human brains don't work on a tickrate like computers - just because our reflexes are much slower than that does not mean we can't see it. It just means that it takes that much longer for us to respond once we finally do see it.
Daniel Reed
>be me
>grug
>tfw Fruity Pebble IIe only play cavenite at 5fps
Joseph Bennett
I support a neo-Ludditism movement using only DOS.
Easton Gomez
IBM PCs already had more latency than 8-bit computers because they had more layers of code to go through for I/O. Usually you'd call a BIOS routine or a DOS routine that then called the BIOS, whereas on 8-bits you typically manipulated the I/O registers directly.
The Apple II in particular had stupidly fast disk drives because of the extreme simplicity of the Disk II controller; it contains only the absolute minimum of stuff needed to operate the disk--the disk controller has six ICs on it and the computer portion seven.
Daniel Myers
youtube.com
Count it. Three seconds to load the OS and six to load the game.
Jonathan Foster
Yeah, but can you watch video in 4K as you also browse the web, and also compile source code, and play leave a AAA game running in the background?
Kayden Thomas
>The difference is that older computers had very few layers between pressing a key and its appearance on the screen
>Apple II
>press key
>scan code is sent to keyboard input register
>read in scan code for the letter A
>program code places the ASCII code for A into the video memory
>modern PC
>press key
>USB packet has to be decoded and go through many many layers of drivers and APIs
>once you've read in the letter A, you have to go through many more layers of drivers and API functions to display it on the screen.
Blake Brown
I clocked 30 seconds to load Windows 7.
Jason Taylor
Are there any input/output ports that don't use all the drivers, or is that OS specific? For example, I'm running Windblows 10 Home. Are there any settings I could use to change the way these inputs are processed?
Jacob Rodriguez
And that's with all of the advancements between then and now.
Adam Bell
The all time record I saw was a Pentium 133Mhz that took about 35 seconds to load Windows 98SE.
Leo Kelly
Input lag really isn't that bad if you have a gaming monitor and decent peripherals. I think too many people get caught up in the interrupt vs. Polling trap. Interrupts were useful back in the day because the slow, single core computers couldn't handle too many memory intensive applications or too much driver overhead. Nowadays CPUs are so fast that 1000Hz USB peripherals are probably about as fast as ps/2 devices could send interrupts.
Almost all perceived lag in a game is going to be from the game engine itself.
Andrew Ramirez
I bet there was another full few minutes between the desktop loading up and being usable.
Samuel Green
Interrupts usually fire off 60 times per second so no they won't be close to as fast as 1000Hz polling. Also the Apple II had no interrupts at all and all I/O was done by polling.
David Nguyen
Yes, by installing gentoo
Blake Stewart
Relevant.
Blake Myers
>up to six times the input lag
Let me explain
>browser (a quasi OS) or an electron app interprets input
>browser calls OS
>OS calls HAL
>processor executes instructions
>Intel ME (processor inside processor) does its (((job)))
>Intel ME calls home
>OS calls home
Michael Perry
That's actually the page that prompted me to post this thread
What keyboards have the lowest latency and are good for gaming?
Cherry MX, Romer G, membrane, et. c?
USB 3 or PS/2?
And what about mice?
Liam Bell
PS/2 was interrupt driven, while USB 2 was polled and thus less efficient. Firewire also supported interrupts and DMA, but USB won in the end because muh cheap chips.
USB 3 added an interrupt-like mechanism but not sure how it compares to real hardware interrupts lagwise.
The key mechanism in not relevant.
Ryder Nelson
I asked about mechanisms because I figured farther key travel might = higher latency. You know, not just the latency from when the signal is sent to the time it is displayed, but also the latency from when the user starts to push the button to the time the signal is sent
Ian Reyes
What are some mice with low latency?