[jandrese]

The context here is the article's author is a twitchy FPS player, those extra 3ms are something that community agonizes over. I appreciated how much effort was put into controlling the variables in this test. There's a whole lot of witchcraft associated with these kinds of efforts and he sat down and did the measurements and got real numbers. My hat is off to OP.

[horsawlarway]

ping is going to dominate over 3ms in pretty much every situation.

And the non-xwayland numbers are all within a single ms of each other.

---

Not to undermine the measurements of the author (agree with you, it's a cool effort), but my read is that this was basically proof that it doesn't matter.

[OkayPhysicist]

In the context of competitive online games, ping is going to be ~10-60ms, depending on your connection to the particular server you're playing on, and not particularly noisy (and that's a roundtrip time. Client-Server latency would be 5-30ms). In order for one value to "dominate over" another in an adversarial context, the variance of the former must be much greater than the base rate of the latter.

Imagine a game that's just a pistol duel. When the kerchief hits the ground, players press a button, first person to press the button wins.

In an ideal world, with no delay whatsover, the probability P(A) of player A shooting no later than player B is 100 (because both players shoot at exactly the same time). If we add 5 ms of delay to player A, then P(A) = 0 (he will always lose). If then we add 50 ms of network latency to both players, P(A) = 0 still, because 55 > 50. If we instead make that 50ms delay 50ms +- 10ms (ignoring normal distribution for the moment, pretending every value in that range is equally likely), there's a 25% chance of player A experiencing an unwinnable delay (any network delay value > 55ms results in a value greater than player B's max of 60ms), resulting in a probability of P(A) = 75% * 50* = 38%.

If we make the network delay 50ms +- 5ms, then P(A) drops to 25%.

[DefineOutside]

You can genuinely feel just a few milliseconds of input latency with a mouse, it disconnects looking around with your physical actions. It's the same way you can feel the difference between low and high refresh rate monitors, even though you can't really count the frames themselves

[JMKH42]

It doesn't matter. Whether you have a ping of 40 or a ping of 300, 3ms is 3ms and will mean you win a little less often.

The saying we have in bike racing marginal gains is "leave no stone unturned, but turn over the big ones first"

So sure, first make sure your internet connection is solid. Then make sure your hardware and game settings are optimizing FPS to a reasonable point of diminishing returns.

Then make sure you don't use XWayland

[gpm]

Lag compensation means ping is an entirely different phenomena with different effects from input latency. While details vary between games for the most part pieces of the game like hitting enemies (but not being hit yourself) and moving your own character are operating on a local simulation with zero latency from ping.

There are weird consequences of this, someone can shoot you after you duck behind a wall because you hadn't yet in their version of the game. An enemy moving left right repeatedly is likely vibrating in your version of the game faster than the rules of the game would otherwise allow. Etc. Ping matters, but it's not comparable to input latency. Input latency really does mean that you can click at the right time and miss your enemy. It really does delay how fast your camera spins when you move your mouse. Etc.

[Tuna-Fish]

Latency is additive, it doesn't matter how much latency you already have, any extra on top always still hurts.

[xbar]

Since 4ms is already about at the limit of my input latency tolerance for snappiness, I came to a different conclusion: "Wayland VRR" is the only tolerable Wayland option.