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by url00 18 days ago
Something interesting is the author right away wants to isolate and reduce placebo. But surely, latency is all about "placebo" and "vibes" and "feel" is it not? The ultimate test is how it feels to use on a personal level.

Of course, where gathering this sort of data _is_ useful is diagnosing and fixing real latency so it obviously has merit. I just think it's ok to lean on taste and experience for most things UI/UX, including latency.

Another point, by couching the comparison in a less technical form (for example, rating a configuration/setup out of 5 stars or some similar approach), it protects from being "too methodological" during testing and data-gathering. One possible issue with the author's methods is if there are degenerative cases that are common in the day-to-day experience of a given configuration, they are unlikely to be present during the precise test that they have setup.

3 comments

Can't say that I agree. I play rhythm games on a national level and benchmarking and reducing input latency is very important in those games.

The games I play (ITGmania) measure accuracy to the tenth of a millisecond, any fluctuation in your hardware latency can ruin your scores and nothing really is more annoying than an inconsistent setup where the latency change between or during a session is absolute hell.

Vibes and latency don't belong in the same sentence at all imo.

It's vibes when you don't have the tools to isolate and measure it. It's unfortunate that “vibe” is almost always pejorative these days.
> But surely, latency is all about "placebo" and "vibes" and "feel" is it not?

Not sure if I can follow but...no?! My first TFT-TV had 2 seconds input lag. Impossible to play video games on it. That has nothing to do with feelings.

Already 10ms delay has a measurable effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qjSGEOEaXo

> But surely, latency is all about "placebo" and "vibes" and "feel" is it not?

In the case matters most, it's not a placebo.

Imagine 2 FPS players with identical ability who play against each other. If one has a system with 4ms latency and the other has one with 5 ms latency, the former will statistically have the upper hand, even if the players can't, in isolation, notice a difference between the 2 systems.