[iamevn]

When you need to add that extra latency it can feel bad. Especially in games where you're hitting tight (~30ms) timing windows. Having your button presses be several timing windows ahead of what you're trying to hit adds mental load that's noticable to me at least.

I got a cabinet for one of my favorite arcade rhythm games, Pop'n Music, a couple of years ago. It's older Firebeat hardware so it's a non-general purpose system specifically built for arcade music games not running a general purpose OS. I was surprised by how much better it felt than the newer versions of the game which run on Windows XP with inherent extra latency in its audio playback. (Other games by the same developer have taken advantage of lower latency audio apis in newer versions of Windows but iirc Pop'n hasn't gotten off XP yet.)