alt Hacker NewsOnly sorta related, but it’s crazy that to me how much our standards have dropped for speed/responsiveness in some areas.
I used to play games on N64 with three friends. I didn’t even have a concept of input lag back then. Control inputs were just instantly respected by the game.
Meanwhile today, if I want to play rocket league with three friends on my Xbox series S (the latest gen, but the less powerful version), I have to deal with VERY noticeable input lag. Like maybe a quarter of a second. It’s pretty much unplayable.
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That may be an issue of going from a CRT tv to an LCD tv. As far as I am aware there was no software manipulation of the video input on a CRT. It just took the input and displayed it on the screen in the only way it could. Newer tvs have all kinds of settings to alter the video which takes processing time. They also typically have a game mode to turn off as much of it as it will allow.
How about the speed of going from a powered off console to playing the actual game? Sleep mode helps with resuming on console, but god forbid you’re on a pc with a game that has anti cheat, or comped menus. You will sit there, sometimes for a full minute waiting. I absolutely cannot stand these games.
Or how channel surfing now requires a 1-2 second latency per channel, versus the way it was seemingly instant from the invention of television through the early 1990s.
Heck yes! I recently dusted off (had to literally dust the inside of the cartridges to get past a black screen, lol) my old Sega Genesis (and bought an HDMI adaptor for it), and have been letting my school age sons play it. They haven't even commented on the basic graphics. They're like "wow dad, no boot time, no connecting to server time, no waiting to skip ads time". They love it.
> I have to deal with VERY noticeable input lag. Like maybe a quarter of a second. It’s pretty much unplayable
Your experience is not normal.
If you’re seeing that much lag, the most likely explanation is your display. Many TVs have high latency for various processing steps that doesn’t matter when you’re watching a movie or TV, but becomes painful when you’re playing games.