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Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

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Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#31

Post by jonathanlydall »

jerlam wrote: post #28

I bought a Logitech wireless mouse called the Marathon which boasted an amazing three-year battery life on two AAs. I initially thought it was broken; it had a maddening delay where the sensors turned off after a short idle time, so when I wanted to use the mouse, it didn't register the first movements since it had to "wake up". This delay wasn't present on the Logitech gaming mouse I previously used, probably a comb…

I’m happy with my $5 wired Logitech mouse as it’s got essentially zero lag, never runs out of batteries and unlike the high end Logitech mice has no “rubber” which tends to invariably go icky over time.

At one point I had a Razer wireless mouse (Mamba I think?) which had no discernible latency and a nice dock for recharging the mouse, I was very happy with it until one evening it just stopped working. While alone in my flat, I stepped away from using my computer for about an hour, didn’t even put it to sleep, came back, and it would no longer move but would still register mouse clicks. I tried contacting customer support asking if there was a way to reset it or reflash the firmware or something and they’re just like “nope”. Last piece of Razer hardware I ever bought.

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#32

Post by haiku2077 »

brookst wrote: post #25
tverbeure wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher refresh rates don't have to be perceptible to be useful: they can shift the balance in head-to-head gaming. Imagine 2 identical gaming setups with 2 players that have the same skill set. In an FPS game, you'd expect each of those players to win 50% of the games. Now switch one monitor from 120Hz to 240Hz. On average, the player on the 240Hz monitor will see their adversary 4ms earlier than the player on the 12…

Do any competitive FPS games actually render 240 different frames in a second? Because if both players’ hardware is doing 60FPS, that monitor difference changes nothing.

Yes, most will go up past 500FPS, even old ones like Quake and classic Counter Strike.

https://youtu.be/nqa7QVwfu7s

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#33

Post by daft_pink »

lostlogin wrote: post #21
daft_pink wrote: post #8

I found that plugging my keyboards directly into my Mac’s limited USB ports is noticably faster. I’m curious if there is a USB hub that I could buy of higher quality as my mac doesn’t have too much i/o

‘USB hub’ and ‘quality’ never go together. I’d love to be wrong on this but haven’t been so far.

Buying a $160 thunderbolt 5 hub for my keyboard? Lol

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#34

Post by sillysaurusx »

ptramo wrote: post #15
ptramo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per the post, I wrote this tool to confirm I was getting jerks of ~10ms every few seconds on one USB port and not the other. This would _suggest_ I can catch differences around the ballpark of 100 Hz. I'm game for a randomized blinded test on 120 Hz refresh rate vs 240 Hz refresh rate. I would indeed be very curious to confirm I can tell the difference with a proper protocol. Many years back (we were on CRTs), I w…

As to how you can perceive the difference between 120 events per second and 240, I have what I hope is a fairly simple explanation. It's like lightning strokes of tens of microseconds making a lasting impression on your perception of the scene. You don't "count" strokes over time, but in space. When you make circles fast and large enough on screen, you can evaluate the number of cursors that appear before your eyes.…

I was going to reply with this:

“If anyone wants to implement this, I think the way to do it is to put the mouse cursor randomly on the edge of a circle whose radius is a few hundred pixels. The randomness is important, though I’m not sure it would be possible to count how many cursors there are.”

And then I realized that doesn’t work, for a few reasons.

One is that you won’t be able to count how many cursors appear during one second. It’ll all look like a jumble.

That leads to the argument that you should place the cursors at a consistent spacing, and the spacing needs to make it so that the cursors stay at the same spot on the screen each loop around the circle.

Unfortunately that doesn’t work either, because you’ll end up seeing a trail of cursors going around a circle once per second, and counting the cursors is hopeless.

So I think you’d need to make a list of the spots on the circle where the cursors should go, then randomly select from them as quickly as possible. That will let each cursor be perceptible because they’ll be spread out over time; the next cursor won’t be just one pixel apart, so this eliminates the “trail of cursors” problem.

I’m still a bit skeptical this could work, but I admit I can’t think of a reason it wouldn’t. You’ll need to be careful, because it’s really easy to fool yourself that you’ve done it correctly when you haven’t.

It would be interesting to make a WebGL canvas and try this out for real. Or maybe just reposition the mouse cursor with Python instead of doing anything graphical.

It seems important to reposition the mouse cursor rather than use WebGL to draw frames, but I think both could work. Actually, the WebGL route would be more faithful to the question of whether gamers specifically can notice 240Hz; there are all kinds of reasons why repositioning the mouse cursor wouldn’t really tell you that. Vice-versa too, because it might be possible to notice when repositioning cursors but not when using WebGL, though I can’t think of why that would be the case.

Neat idea. Thanks.

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#35

Post by ptramo »

amluto wrote: post #26
sillysaurusx wrote: post #10

I can buy that humans can see at least 120hz at a minimum. 60Hz is the generally accepted threshold, but I’ve long suspected that 120Hz has mostly imperceptible effects that are still noticeable, if rarely. I can’t buy this: > I've also learnt I do benefit from the 8 kHz setting of my mouse, as even at 3200 DPI with fast & smooth motion, some frames still miss a pointer update It may be true that pointer updates were…

The author didn’t say that they have a use for those 3200 updates per second other than as a workaround for some other issue. With a competently composited desktop and applications that pace input processing and frame generation well, and ignoring pointer acceleration, 1 correctly timed update per frame is enough. (As far as I know this does not exist from any vendor on a modern system other than for games, although…

First it's settings not real numbers. I'm not claiming that's how the mice actually perform, only how I tell them to perform.

Second 3200 was DPI not Hz. I can trivially tell how much I have to move with 3200 DPI (my sweet spot with 2 4K monitors), 4800 DPI, and 6400.

For Hz, it was the polling rate. With a configured 8000 Hz polling rate which is a lie/peak, I still see stalls in the 4ms range with my hardware.

As to acceleration I disable it. To truly lose it at high DPIs I've had to install RawAccel on Microsoft Windows.

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#36

Post by timewizard »

haiku2077 wrote: post #32
brookst wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any competitive FPS games actually render 240 different frames in a second? Because if both players’ hardware is doing 60FPS, that monitor difference changes nothing.

Yes, most will go up past 500FPS, even old ones like Quake and classic Counter Strike. https://youtu.be/nqa7QVwfu7s

More directly if the game engine only updates player state every 60 seconds (tick rate) then is this 4ms advantage actually present for the 240Hz case?

Further if your network has more than 4ms of jitter then I don't think you can make any concrete claim in either direction.

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#37

Post by leni536 »

timewizard wrote: post #36
haiku2077 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, most will go up past 500FPS, even old ones like Quake and classic Counter Strike. https://youtu.be/nqa7QVwfu7s

More directly if the game engine only updates player state every 60 seconds (tick rate) then is this 4ms advantage actually present for the 240Hz case? Further if your network has more than 4ms of jitter then I don't think you can make any concrete claim in either direction.

There is still theoretically an edge if you just show the same frames statistically earlier to one player.

You can present the game state statistically earlier to the player with the higher refresh rate display.

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#38

Post by modeless »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #10

I can buy that humans can see at least 120hz at a minimum. 60Hz is the generally accepted threshold, but I’ve long suspected that 120Hz has mostly imperceptible effects that are still noticeable, if rarely. I can’t buy this: > I've also learnt I do benefit from the 8 kHz setting of my mouse, as even at 3200 DPI with fast & smooth motion, some frames still miss a pointer update It may be true that pointer updates were…

How much latency you can perceive greatly depends on the context. But in the right context humans can perceive display latency down close to 1 ms as demonstrated by Microsoft Research many years ago. There is no excuse to be skeptical about that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOvQCPLkPt4

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#39

Post by dubbie99 »

timewizard wrote: post #36
haiku2077 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, most will go up past 500FPS, even old ones like Quake and classic Counter Strike. https://youtu.be/nqa7QVwfu7s

More directly if the game engine only updates player state every 60 seconds (tick rate) then is this 4ms advantage actually present for the 240Hz case? Further if your network has more than 4ms of jitter then I don't think you can make any concrete claim in either direction.

My theory about why it helps gamers to have a higher frame rate is that for something like a whip turn, with a low frame rate, your brain has to take a brief moment to work out where it ended up looking after the pan. But if your frame rate is high enough, you brain can keep updating its state during the pan because the updates are continuous enough not to lose “state” during it. This means when you finish the fast move, there is no delay while you reorient yourself for a few milliseconds.

Re: Toys/Lag: Jerk Monitor

#40

Post by haiku2077 »

timewizard wrote: post #36
haiku2077 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, most will go up past 500FPS, even old ones like Quake and classic Counter Strike. https://youtu.be/nqa7QVwfu7s

More directly if the game engine only updates player state every 60 seconds (tick rate) then is this 4ms advantage actually present for the 240Hz case? Further if your network has more than 4ms of jitter then I don't think you can make any concrete claim in either direction.

Current esports titles don't use tick rates.

https://youtu.be/GqhhFl5zgA0

You can film the screen in slow motion and visually see more fluid motion (and see how it reacts to player input).

Games also use predictive methods and client side hit detection to mitigate most of the effects of network latency in the common cases.

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