Hardware The Dark Side of Overdrive

And how much does reaction time vary from person to person? And even from day to day? or hour to hour?

I guess a good night sleep would have more impact on the results than monitor lag.

Oh. I though my eyes were playing tricks on me. I thought I saw this as well, but couldn't find any reason why this should happen. (At first it seemed like the Samsung 910T on my left was faster than the one to the right of my main monitor...)

 

I still use a 21" CRT with a Trinitron tube, and it's still going strong. When calibrated, it has great colour accuracy, instant response time, and none of the other problems associated with LCD panels. The on;y real disadvantage i can think of is the weight and the amount of room on my desk it takes up.

 

what application should i use to get similar photo of Bit-tech's screen stopwatch comparison??

just hooked up my housemate's 17inch Dell Ultrasharp with my Samsung T240. the 17inch is quoted to have a much slower response time.

 

Bring on the 120hz ultra thin DLP monitors.
(yes i just made that up, but i can wish )

 

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test has a built in stopwatch under the response time tests

 

so how do i have it running at same time on 2 monitors like in your shots?

i can only get 1 running.

 

Set your display mode to clone, so its displaying the same thing on both screens.

 

Makes me happy that I still am sticking to good old crts for so long just be sure to let me know when something that is actually better performance wise and quality wise than a crt so I can get something that is newer. lol

 

Motion sickness from input lag

Speak for yourself, but I know that way back in the day when I had SLI'd Voodoo2s with the Wicked3D-customized miniGL for Quake 3 Arena, through a CRT of course, I had to turn off triple buffering and vsync buffer switching because the extra lag made me not just a crappier player but made me feel motion sick too. Triple buffering added about 16-32mS of extra lag. I'm not saying that I was "leet", but my scores went down and my face went green once I enabled triple buffering, so I'm prepared to believe that another 16mS of lag on an LCD would have the same effect.

It depends what you want... if I'm playing a really "twitchy" game, I don't care that much about fantastic image fidelity. I used to play Quakeworld and Q3A with wider field of view and other settings that made things not pretty, but I enjoyed the game more because I was more competitive that way.

Do you get bothered about the fact that car companies spend money sponsoring motorsport which they ought to be using on improving their family cars? Some people like to go fast, others like to take a bit more time and enjoy the view.

 

Quake 3 Arena always used to make me feel ill as well. It is to date the only game that has made me feel physically sick.

 

I didn't see anything in the article that mentioned testing two different displays using the same video signal. Its conceivable that the lag is being introduced by the PC or video card as a result of scaling the image to two different sized displays.

People frequently incorrectly attribute what they see to the wrong reason - this might be one of those times. There weren't any attempts made to determine or eliminate possible sources of errors beyond attributing the delay to the monitors themselves.

There are a couple ways to address this:

1) Compare screens with identical resolution. During testing swap monitors between video output connectors (do not change video card settings) to see if a consistent delay exists, and if it sticks with the monitors, or video output connectors.

2) Using test equipment (oscilloscope) check for delays between the video outputs from the video card. You would need to compare the horizontal and vertical sync pulse timing between video connectors.

3) Connect both monitors to a video splitter, and drive them with the same signal. A delay in this test eliminates all possible delay sources except the monitors themselves. (Such splitters may add a small delay from its input to all outputs, but all outputs should be in sync with each other.

Rather than illustrate problems with monitors, this article illustrates problems with the test set-up. _ALL_ of my questions revolve around the test set-up rather than the monitors.

 

I think I'm in the same boat. I would really value and appreciate a list from Bit-Tech of total real monitor lag. Breaking out the number in other columns to specifically list input lag would be nice, too.

Not being miserable is important. I'm going to be buying a monitor soon, but I'd be more than happy to wait if you guys will tackle this one.


Also, brett_cgb raises a good point. Make the test setup good, so we can all trust the data and hard work.


Nice bit of muck-raking tech journalism, btw!

 

Quite a while ago (2005) I noticed a clear difference in my reaction time playing on a notebook display and playing on my big screen, a Dell 2001FP. I haven't heard something about LCD lag at this time. So I tried to investigate this and found a lag of about 17..20ms for that monitor. Some do lough about people complaining about the lag, but all too often it decides about life and death in FPS games. If you suddendly encounter an opponent the one with the faster reaction time will make the frag.
I created two programs to measure the lag of monitors that are described here: http://www.draebenstedt.de/reaction/loopback.html
One is a stop watch application that writes the current time on screen but syncronously with the screen refresh (vertical sync). http://www.draebenstedt.de/reaction/timecode.zip
The time is written on screen from top down on a differnt location on screen each time to avoid blurred numbers that are continously overwritten. The second application can measure the lag by tracking a moving pattern with an optical mouse! Don't lough! It works! Please have a look: http://www.draebenstedt.de/reaction/loopback.html

 

Yes and what happens if your opponent has a good night's sleep too... Why put yourself at a disadvantage.

I game regularly with 3 other friends, with different computers - some LCD. Its the same ranking of players every week unless we switch computers around. When you switch to a computer with input lag the first thing that happens is you overshoot when you try and aim for a while until you get used to it, and even when you get used to it, over a long session you lose a few extra points you usually wouldn't - it's not a huge effect, but its there.

 

On my laptop I have exessive input lag. When I run around 25~30fps, the inputlag can be as high as 0.5 SECONDS. When I turn the graphics down, it becomes playable at 80fps...
Thing is: I noticed the input lag when playing Unreal tournament (the old one, on my 8600M GS latop). It shows itself in continuously missing your target when shooting, way before you notice the lag itself. Playing UT on linux went smooth and way better.

 

No.. because the cash they spend on motorsport DOES filter down to ordinary cars.. or didn't you realise this?

Besides... as you say, different people have different priorities, so as you can imagine, I was merely stating my opinion, not a fact. I just feel that a PVA priced screen with IPS quality would be a better choice. I move my mouse, and my cursor moves immediately, with no trace of lag... even though I know it's there. I just can't believe anyone would sit down at my machine and notice anything. I'm not exactly a slouch in the games department either... but if the amount of lag we're talking about is what this monitor in front of me is suffering from, then trust me... it won't effect your games performance in the slightest.

Much is made of people's reaction times, but you know what? Despite gamers thinking they have some uber skills, they don't. It's the same with sportsmen, athletes, even F1 racing drivers.. they all have the same reaction times as you or I... or any other ordinary guy in the street.. it's been proven. What we perceive as preternatural, catlike reflexes are nothing more than their ability to predict what comes next due to being a master of what they do. You do realise that 10ms is 1/100th of a second don't you? Are you seriously telling me that your reflexes are so fast that a screen lag of 1/100th of a second will ruin your game? If so, contact The Lancet, or any other esteemed medical journal, because you my friend, have just made medical history.


Also... it's usual for people to say hello in their first post So many 1st posts in this thread.... Hmmm.

 

I'm still to say hello properly I'll do it when I start a log I swear

 

Hello!

Why wait

I Look forward to your log.

 

You clearly did not read the article in full and jumped to conclusions. To quote some text from page three:

"At this point that we should point out that these results are completely consistent regardless of the brand or GPU of graphics card we used. Likewise, swapping the monitors round on the DVI ports had no impact on the results. Just to emphasise this, we’ve included shots of a pair of identical Dell monitors in clone mode displaying almost exactly the same time on the stopwatch application.

 

Sorry, that quote above came from the bottom of page two in the article, not page three.