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Fast

catherinejue.com

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Re: Fast

#31

Post by izzydata »

chamomeal wrote: post #28

Only sorta related, but it’s crazy that to me how much our standards have dropped for speed/responsiveness in some areas. I used to play games on N64 with three friends. I didn’t even have a concept of input lag back then. Control inputs were just instantly respected by the game. Meanwhile today, if I want to play rocket league with three friends on my Xbox series S (the latest gen, but the less powerful version), I…

That may be an issue of going from a CRT tv to an LCD tv. As far as I am aware there was no software manipulation of the video input on a CRT. It just took the input and displayed it on the screen in the only way it could. Newer tvs have all kinds of settings to alter the video which takes processing time. They also typically have a game mode to turn off as much of it as it will allow.

Re: Fast

#32

Post by Aurornis »

> Rarely in software does anyone ask for “fast.” We ask for features, we ask for volume discounts, we ask for the next data integration. We never think to ask for fast.

Almost everywhere I’ve worked, user-facing speed has been one of the highest priorities. From the smallest boring startup to the multi billion dollar company.

At companies that had us target metrics, speed and latency was always a metric.

I don’t think my experience has been all that unique. In fact, I’d be more surprised if I joined a company and they didn’t care about how responsive the product felt, how fast the pages loaded, and any weird lags that popped up.

Re: Fast

#33

Post by Aurornis »

chamomeal wrote: post #28

Only sorta related, but it’s crazy that to me how much our standards have dropped for speed/responsiveness in some areas. I used to play games on N64 with three friends. I didn’t even have a concept of input lag back then. Control inputs were just instantly respected by the game. Meanwhile today, if I want to play rocket league with three friends on my Xbox series S (the latest gen, but the less powerful version), I…

> I have to deal with VERY noticeable input lag. Like maybe a quarter of a second. It’s pretty much unplayable

Your experience is not normal.

If you’re seeing that much lag, the most likely explanation is your display. Many TVs have high latency for various processing steps that doesn’t matter when you’re watching a movie or TV, but becomes painful when you’re playing games.

Re: Fast

#36

Post by nu11ptr »

This is interesting. It got me to think. I like it when articles provoke me to think a bit more on a subject.

I have found this true for myself as well. I changed back over to Go from Rust mostly for the iteration speed benefits. I would replace "fast" with "quick", however. It isn't so much I think about raw throughput as much as "perceived speed". That is why things like input latency matter in editors, etc. If something "feels fast" (ie Go compiles), we often don't even feel the need to measure. Likewise, when things "feel slow" (ie Java startup), we just don't enjoy using them, even if in some ways they actually are fast (like Java throughput).

Re: Fast

#37

Post by OsrsNeedsf2P »

This is one of the reasons I switched from Unity to Godot. There is something about Godot loading fast and compiling fast that makes it so much more immersive to spend hours chugging away at your projects for.

Re: Fast

#38

Post by fouronnes3 »

Aurornis wrote: post #33
chamomeal wrote: post #28

Only sorta related, but it’s crazy that to me how much our standards have dropped for speed/responsiveness in some areas. I used to play games on N64 with three friends. I didn’t even have a concept of input lag back then. Control inputs were just instantly respected by the game. Meanwhile today, if I want to play rocket league with three friends on my Xbox series S (the latest gen, but the less powerful version), I…

> I have to deal with VERY noticeable input lag. Like maybe a quarter of a second. It’s pretty much unplayable Your experience is not normal. If you’re seeing that much lag, the most likely explanation is your display. Many TVs have high latency for various processing steps that doesn’t matter when you’re watching a movie or TV, but becomes painful when you’re playing games.

This does not undermine chamomeal's argument. The whole point is that back in the N64 days, they could not possibly have had that experience. There was no way to even make it happen. The fact that today it's a real possibility when you've done nothing obviously wrong is a definite failure.

Re: Fast

#39

Post by constantcrying »

I think that people generally underestimate what even small increases in the interaction time between human and machine cost. Interacting with sluggish software is exhausting, clicking a button and being left uncertain whether it did anything is tedious and software being fast is something you can feel.

Windows is the worst offender here, the entire desktop is sluggish even though it there is no computational task which justifies those delays.

Re: Fast

#40

Post by PaulHoule »

izzydata wrote: post #31
chamomeal wrote: post #28

Only sorta related, but it’s crazy that to me how much our standards have dropped for speed/responsiveness in some areas. I used to play games on N64 with three friends. I didn’t even have a concept of input lag back then. Control inputs were just instantly respected by the game. Meanwhile today, if I want to play rocket league with three friends on my Xbox series S (the latest gen, but the less powerful version), I…

That may be an issue of going from a CRT tv to an LCD tv. As far as I am aware there was no software manipulation of the video input on a CRT. It just took the input and displayed it on the screen in the only way it could. Newer tvs have all kinds of settings to alter the video which takes processing time. They also typically have a game mode to turn off as much of it as it will allow.

I hear it claimed that you're only supposed to enable game mode for competitive multiplayer games -- but I've found that many single player games like Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet are unplayable without game mode enabled.

It could be my unusual nervous system. I'm really good at rhythm games, often clearing a level on my first try and amazing friends who can beat me at other genres. But when I was playing League of Legends, which isn't very twitchy, it seemed like I would just get hit and there was nothing I could do about it when I played on a "gaming" laptop but found I could succeed at the game when I hooked up an external monitor. I ran a clock and took pictures showing that the external monitor was 30ms faster than the built-in monitor.

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