Games & input lag.

The gamecube controller works with Smash Bros Brawl, which is pretty much the perfect game to measure input lag on the wii. Punchout would be equally as good.

 

I personally found that the RB2 auto-calibration was not very accurate. But for what you're trying to accomplish, it should suffice. It wasn't bad, but it set both a little higher than doing it manually.

I don't think it will affect the Video input lag as your AVR should technically just send the stream straight through, but it will be interesting nonetheless. I have compared running the game in STEREO vs Dolby Digital (bitstreams to your AVR), and using DD adds ~50ms to the Audio lag.

 

it works with Brawl and one of the Mortal Kombat games.

 

Sing Star PS3 also has an auto calibrate feature... but it doesn't work with my amp, as it goes into "powersave" when there's no sound for a second and thus, the sound gets cut off, if sound starts anew.

But I am very pleased with my TV... according to Guitar Hero and my (well, I am still a young gamer ) good reflexes, I got 0ms lag (at my friends house, his Ambilight TV got 150ms lag... horrible^^).

 

I am detecting no difference in latency between Xbox 360 wired and wireless controllers. On the mega laggy NXE interface both are registering the same button press in the same area of the interface at 23 frames.

Additionally, the original Mick West feature on Gamasutra pegs the PS3 XMB at 50ms with a wireless controller. I'm going to do another test, but I'm fairly confident that the wired vs wireless and Bluetooth vs MS transmitter comparison is essentially a score draw. This is fairly intriguing in that it means that according to the previous Soul Calibur 4 test, the lag there is in the game code, not the controllers.

I will be doing some more tests on this as I am finding that choosing the exact frame where the button has been pressed can be quite difficult! However, I am now confident in the calibration of my Dell 2405FPW... 1080p has two frames lag, while 720p has three.

 

To add to the OP:

- Digital controllers, like 8-way joysticks can add lag depending on switching technology used, e.g. snap-action microswitches can significantly vary in quality; they have intrinsic lag that can overlap the beginning/ end of an input...

- Converters for aforementioned controllers, to use on multiple systems, can vary in quality and add lag too...

- You can even think of controller 'deadzones', 'maximum throws' etc. adding to 'lag'...

EDIT: Even your reactions can vary throughout the day and contribute to 'lag'...

 

My Ben Heck latency controller monitor arrived today. For now I can only measure Xbox 360 titles, so feel free to hit me with games you'd like tested...

 

I'd like to see Halo 3 & Gears 2.

 

Wouldn't mind seeing Shadow Complex and Crackdown tested.

 

Madden 2010

 

Halo 3 and Rock Band.

 

I've done a bunch of Unreal Engine games, Halo, CoD WaW, Burnout Paradise, LEGO Batman (gonna do that with v-lock on/off), SF IV, SC IV, Call of Juarez (for 40fps action). I want to try Bioshock with v-sync on/off, Gears 2, Virtua Fighter 5, Forza 2, Guitar Hero, CoD4 and Overlord 2. Overlord 2 doublebuffers with v-sync between 20fps and 30fps so will be an interesting test.

 

Ninja Gaiden 2 and Resi Evil 5? (Just in-case )

 

Ben Heck's tech only works with the wireless controller, which means I can only use it for PC and Xbox 360. I do have an adaptor for running the 360's wired pad with the PS3, but Ben just couldn't get the wired controller working with the latency board.

It's a real pain because it would be really useful in the double-buffer vs triple-buffer debate. Perhaps it is something we could replicate on PC instead with other games.

I've been conducting FPS analysis on my captured clips, then super-imposing the camera shots over the captures. The idea is to get some idea of frame rate and its impact on response.

The biggest eye-opener thus far has been that my aged Dell 2405FPW introduces three frames of lag at 720p (ouch!) and two at 1080p. Also interesting is that the accepted measurement of Halo 3 lag being 133ms appears to be somewhat exaggerated. I am reading it at closer to 100ms.

 

Back when KZ2 launched, people were making a lot of fuss about it on youtube.
The gameplay was great, the graphics were (among) the best of this generation, the sound was unbelievable, and so on.
So what was left for the haters?
Input lag!!
How they measured it on youtube was: you take a camera which records in 60fps (the 100-150 dollar ixus already do this). And you record your controller, and your tv in the same frame.
Then you press a button for a fraction of a second, and you release it.
When you play it back, frame-by-frame, you count the frames it takes for your action to be seen on screen et voila!

The funny thing is that with the KZ2-hate, it turned out that halo3 had among the biggest input lag of all modern games. And nobody ever complained about that. So all in all it was a little overrated, imo. Hope this helps

 

Well, in this case the "haters" are correct and I would hesitate to label people who criticise KZ2's controls in the way you have because it clearly and measurably is a far less responsive game than other shooters.

But it is worth pointing out that many people criticised Killzone's controls to the point where Guerrilla Games issued a patch. I have measured Killzone lag at at a baseline of 166ms which will rise still further when the frame rate drops. I can't use my new technique for the measurement, but I did enough tests using the old technique to establish that this is the real result.

As I have mentioned, I'm getting Halo 3 at 100ms, which is effectively the lowest possible lag for a 30fps game, so there is indeed a difference.

The measurement technique is also sound - it was used by Neversoft in the Guitar Hero games they produced. A variation of it, which I am using, is being used by Infinity Ward for fine-tuning Modern Warfare 2.

But in KZ2's favour, what I will say is that the whole game has a sense of "heft" and "inertia" about it. You can either argue that the game is laggy, which it demonstrably is, or you could argue that it is more realistic in that the human body operates with "lag" itself.

 

I wonder what the input lag is for a game as geometry war2? Sometime I feel like there is some consistent lag to the input, more than in its first rendition. I think it could be interesting to measure it.
Of course I could be mislead, the action is often messy and the little "slowdown" which happens when you die may confuse me even further.
Does somebody feel like me in regard to this game?

 

According to the gamasutra article halo3 is between 133-166msec

geometry wars (Ive never played it but have seen screenshots ) should be less than 100msec, if its not then the makers should be shot

 

Yes I'm aware of the Gamasutra article, but in all fairness to Mick West (without whose work I doubt we'd be doing this at all), using the latency controller board gives more accurate results than his method. There's a bit more of a story about Halo 3 related to our Natal article, which I'll be mentioning in the DF article.

Mick is correct in that firing and jumping are two entirely different measurements though. Which you would expect really - the act of jumping physically takes longer than the act of pulling a trigger. This is part of what I'm trying to say vis a vis Killzone 2. Latency in controller response is often deliberate, but I don't think there's any excuse for adding deliberate lag on pulling a trigger in a shooter (and that's where I get a 166ms measurement for KZ2 using Mick's technique).