The Dark Side of Overdrive

Originally Posted by Atomm
Tim,

I can't thank you enough for this article. Let me explain why.

I am an avid gamer. I also happen to have problems with motion sickness. Even on CRT's, certain games would make me so sick, I couldn't play them more than a few minutes.

When I moved to an LCD, I made sure to get the fastest response time I could, 2MS. Since then, not only do I have more problems, games that never bothered me are now causing me problems. I believe I am overly sensitive to issues like lagging or delay and my LCD may be the exact cause of my new problems. I would have never figured this out without your article.

Since Lag doesn't appear to be something you've looked for in all of your reviews, would you mind taking a minute to list the monitors you know have no lag? I'm going to buy one immediately and would be happy to do so from here.

Thanks!

Atomm
Gamers Radio

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

Originally Posted by Smilodon


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.

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.

Originally Posted by snorbert

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. :D

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.

Originally Posted by Pookeyhead

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.

Originally Posted by brett_cgb
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.

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.

Ahhh, this is the audiophile agruement for PCs! Finally, WE have something to get annoyed about

Any lag there is is way smaller than any human response time anyway, so let's be honest, does it really matter?

No one's reaction times are so fast as to be nerfed by the lag on my monitor, and if they say they are, they're just BSing to make themselves sound "leet"

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.

Image fidelity is the PC/LCD audiophile argument. As long as the image quality is 'good enough', then a few more percentage points of color gamut or a slight ghosting don't actually hurt anything. If you have two different screens sitting next to each other, then of course that raises the bar for 'good enough', since you ACTUALLY have something to compare to. LCD screens have only recently reached 'good enough' so it's still a pretty relevant argument, especially for artists for whom color matters. Most of the time, your eyes and brain can adjust for a lot of deficiency with no harm done.

Lag, however, can affect your fast gaming whether or not you notice it. To add to Idcrobert's very salient points, in a worst case scenario, the screen input lag, triple buffering, framerate, input processing, bluetooth mouse connection, and your slow human responses are all ADDITIVE. Even if you don't notice, you could be gimping your already crappy human reaction by as much as 25%. Wouldn't you love to react 25% faster? Aim 10% better? Get 5% more kills to put you higher on the score list?

Also, AlexAlex is my hero. THAT is how you get reliable data. I'd love to have a hardware review site do that kind of testing for every screen out there.

I'm really amused that bit-tech doesn't have any CRTs around to compare to despite going on and on about how they have no lag, so they have to use the 3007. I'm reallllly interested in the lag-free panel mentioned, I might have to hunt that one down. (Ok, I realize they probably just wanted to avoid the trouble of trying to take photos of CRTs, but it's not THAT hard :D )

I can be very clear about input lag affecting gaming performance: it's bigger than you think. In my case it's not my screen, but something windows does wrong (and linux does right, compared it with UT). And the thing is: where I usually hit quite a lot (many people do), with input lag, I miss a lot (which I usually don't). I've had a direct comparison with about 1.5 minute in between, and it was a shockingly clear difference. And that difference is still there even when the input lag isn't noticed, you just miss a lot.

That's why buying cheap is not always a good idea. Look at Eizo - since I bought L557 I use only their panels. Not cheap, but professional quality and no lag (despite having a 10 or 12 bit gamma curve correction and so on). They are perfect in every way. I compared them to some Belinea, Iiyama and Samsung screens and there is no comparison really. It's like comparing a Murcielago to Golf :)

That was a good read (stuff I didn't know), but please, don't enable auto play on the videos in the middle of a block of text. I haven't read up to that point. I don't want the videos streaming.

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