I just gotta say I LOVE these un-styled pages. I come across them more and more – a result of us all being sick of bloated web?
You should try the readability mode in Firefox
Keyboard latency
151–160 of 274 posts
Re: Keyboard latency
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also clear on rhythm games like Stepmania. Here's a random video from a keyboard user: https://youtu.be/TWiMnENdcyY?t=56 At this speed the player is reacting (and hitting with correct timing) about ten notes (arrows) per second. This is possible by memorizing and reacting to group patterns instead of individual notes, but more importantly, reacting unconsciously. A player can play at this level without consci…
A big difference between Hexagon and most other rhythm games like Stepmania, Beatmanias IIDX, Guitar Hero, etc , is that pattern is the same. Just like musicians memorize complex music that they later perform[1] with precise timing, the same is possible for these step/note patterns. I've personally seen someone perform one of the insane speed/note-density DDR songs blindfolded . Humans have surprisingly good internal…
Music video games can easily thwart the pre-memorization with the randomized chart (often considered essential to master the game). Players typically learn the timing, but possibly not the entire patterns. It is still remarkable that top-ranked players can do much, much better on a new song at the first glance---probably because the music is much more predictable than the pattern itself, so one can guide the pattern recognization with the music.
Re: Keyboard latency
#153I'm surprised the "humans don't notice 100 ms" argument is even made. That's trivially debunkable with a simple blind A/B test at the command line using `sleep 0.1` with and without `sleep` aliased to `true`. To my eyes, the delay is obvious at 100 ms, noticeable at 50 ms, barely perceptible at 20 ms, and unnoticeable at 10 ms. Not to mention that 100 ms is musically a 16th note at 150 bpm. Being off by a 16th note e…
«Being off by a 16th note even at that speed is – especially for percussive instruments – obvious.»
So was he rushing or dragging?
Re: Keyboard latency
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I immediately switched to skeptic mode when I saw no actuation points or normalization for travel distance. All this is showing is that to move further it takes longer. Duh. Why even bother pointing out the polling rate? That's like setting up runners at random places on the racetrack to measure who's faster. The guy/gal that starts closest to the finish line isn't necessarily faster. I'm using Cherry MX Speed switch…
> I immediately switched to skeptic mode when I saw no actuation points or normalization for travel distance. All this is showing is that to move further it takes longer. I thought his explanation (that delay from the start of the motion) was a good one. Unless someone is starting with a key partially depressed/near the actuation point (which you certainly could do), the key travel time is going to be a part of the p…
But that's not how people game. When I play FPS on my MX Blue keyboard I don't make my fingers sit above the keys, but into the keys, depressing them almost until they're in the activation point. I'd guess people on linear switches don't do this, but they also probably slam their keys faster.
The "gaming" keyboards he used were also pretty shoddy. Now, I'm not necessarily saying gaming keyboards offer better latency, because that's not why I got mine, but his methods seem weird.
Re: Keyboard latency
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine though. It's about the experience end-to-end. I love the apple keyboards. I still type faster on them than other keyboards, including high-end mechanical keyboards. The short keys and actuation feel responsive, yet I've never felt like I've accidentally triggered a key.
Agreed, and I don't understand the hate many people (seem to) have for them - the most ergonomic keyboards are those that require the least amount of repetitive motion. Not that there isn't an adjustment period, but some seem to pull out their Jump To Conclusion mats a little early.
you don't need to bottom out regular mechanical keyboards, which means you're not constantly slamming your finger against a hard surface. You do need to bottom out scissor switches.
Re: Keyboard latency
#156I have something interesting about USB input latency to share. In 2014 I built a new computer with a i5-4590 CPU, ASUS Z97-A motherboard and 8GB of Kingston DDR3-1866 memory. One thing I instantly noticed was that my mouse (Logitech G400) would feel "delayed" compared to my older computer from 2010 (i3-550, Intel DH55HC motherboard). I could have the same OS (tested Win7 and Ubuntu), GPU and monitor between both comp…
Are you implying it was the RAM?
Re: Keyboard latency
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, and I don't understand the hate many people (seem to) have for them - the most ergonomic keyboards are those that require the least amount of repetitive motion. Not that there isn't an adjustment period, but some seem to pull out their Jump To Conclusion mats a little early.
"the most ergonomic keyboards are those that require the least amount of repetitive motion" Not sure I can agree with that. I was using one of the Apple keyboards for quite a long time while running liveops on an online game (which meant rapid response whenever incidents happened, jumping into shells and constantly typing like my life depended on it), and developed fairly severe wrist problems within a couple months.…
Ditto, after a bad strain injury on my wrist I bought a Kinesis. I don't think I could really use a computer without it. For me though it's mostly wrist angle; while I love the tactile mechanical switches I don't think the impact is a huge factor unless you are prone to pressing very hard on a scissor switch or a linear switch.
Re: Keyboard latency
#158IMO, a better measure would be from activation of the switch, as opposed to the beginning of key travel. I don't start waiting for the character to appear on my screen from the moment I begin to press down. My anticipation begins when I feel the tactile feedback of the switch activating (or the switch bottoming out on switches that don't offer tactile feedback). On a keyboard with good tactile feedback, I might not m…
I wouldn't be surprised if the Apple keyboard is the fastest just because it has very shallow keys.
We need to request to include a test of on screen keyboard then
Re: Keyboard latency
#159"It all started because I had this feeling that some old computers feel much more responsive than modern machines." s/modern/recent/ "For example, an iMac G4 running macOS 9 or an Apple 2 both feel quicker than my 4.2 GHz Kaby Lake system." Kaby Lake system running OSX? I have one of the last G4 that came with OS9. Based on intuition it would make audio applications "feel" slower, when OSX came out I did not "upgrade…
I suspect the culprit is not the hardware, but the software.
Back in the day there were very little between the keyboard and the screen, and most of it were either in rom or in ram.
Never mind that unless one were dealing with a big iron or similar, multi-tasking was a big nope.
These days most OSs have 10s to 100s of processes going right after a first boot on a clean install. And all those can trip something at "random" intervals.
Re: Keyboard latency
#160This article prompted the following questions for me: 1. How well did the historical systems do, and why? Presumably non-negligible key travel is not a modern invention. 2. How much of the latency is key travel? (i.e. what korethr said) 3. How exactly were the keys pressed/how fast were they pressed? All the article says about the experimental setup is "The start-of-input was measured by pressing two keys at once – o…
1. i suspect it comes down only a single program having full reign of the system at a time, and everything living in either RAM or ROM (no page faults etc).