not really, input lag has multiple factors, all of which are affecting all genres equally.
type of Vsync, GPU utilisation and controller polling.
Yes
somehow a simple game like SF6, with 2 characters in front of a static background, has more latency than a massive 100+ player online shooter.
on original N64 hardware Mario 64's ENGINE latency, independent of the TV, is 67ms
that's an unstable 30fps + vsync, non-competitive game.
The majority of the time spent to calculate the game logic and draw a frame, in all genres, goes to rendering what you're seing in the screen. So things like rendering techniques, post processing, resolution, quality of the textures in screen, affect way more.
Depending on the needs of the game, so shared between the genre, devs prioritize some or other things. In open worlds they need to store in memory the logic, textures, animations, state, etc, of nearby npcs, enemies, players, props or environment around you. So often backgrounds or characters are less detailed or run it at 30fps to bump detail.
But these things affect to how much time a frame takes to get rendered, but since games often are locked to 30 or 60 fps isn't that relevant even if still is since higher render time could push the input lag half a frame or almost a frame.
But input lag measures the amount of frames/time spent between you press a button and see the result. By looking at game of the same genre, you'll know that they will have same priorities like locking or not the framerate, locking it at a similar framerate and having a in theory similar frame time for rendering, plus also a relatively similar amount of game logic to process each frame.
So the comparisions will be made in more similar conditions, and also made using the same platform or at least display and controller (in case of fighting games often using a custom arcadestick with a Brook UFB, the best motherboard in terms of controller input lag for custom arcade sticks) to spot the differences in input lag.
So leaving aside the differences of hardware/OS & drivers overhead, display or controller, rendering and game logic difference between genres etc. you get a more direct and fair comparision of what affects the input lag between similar games, which is the related game engine specific and game specific logic code dedicated to detect inputs and affect the game logic and interrupt animations.
By design, when an input gets detected some animations are played sooner or later. As an example, in a fighting game a low punch gets played faster than a strong punch and at the same time depending on previous attacks there will be a recovery time where no new attacks can be shown.
In addition to this, there's the transitions between animations: depending on the case animations get blended or wait until a beter time to transition to the new one. But not in case of fighting games, where previous animations get directly stopped when you can play a new attack animation to provide a faster and more responsive action.
not true anymore. especially in 120hz mode.
a CRT has 16.6ms of latency when measured from the bottom of the screen, and 8.3ms of latency measured from the center. (usually the input lag is measured from the center)
My Samsung has 9.8ms latency measured from the center of the screen at 60hz,
and 5.4ms at 120hz.
so it's basically almost equal at 60hz and faster than a CRT at 120hz.
LG is almost as fast as that too these days.
gaming PC monitors these days usually have way lower input lag than CRTs, especially at high refresh rates, but also often at 60hz
The 16.67ms/60Hz or 120Hz is the refresh rate, the frequency at the screen gets updated, so the maximium framerate that can be shown. There are CRTs and LCDs with 60Hz, 75Hz, 80Hz or 120Hz to name a few. In the case of tvs the older CRT ones were commonly at 60Hz for NTSC and 50Hz for PAL, and the modern CRTs 120Hz (NTSC) or 100Hz (PAL), refreshes also more frequent in modern CRT PC displays.
But if talking to the average experience of an arcade game or a standard tv plugged to an old console yes, the common stuff was 60Hz/50Hz, so over these Hz is better refresh in LCDs or CRTs.
But refresh rate is different than display lag. Display lag is the time spent by the display to show whatever the console/PC sent. Different displays with the same refresh rate have different display lag. You can be playing the same game with the same controller and the same console in different displays and the game will be more or less responsive because of the differences in display lag.
In competitive play display lag is a deal, and often there are cases where players complain about the display lag of the displays in certain tournaments. I remember the case in recent Street Fighter ones.
Here you have more info about display lag in modern displays, mentioned by them as 'input lag', with some examples of recent tvs:
https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tests/inputs/input-lag
They show a table with 274 recent tvs which at 60Hz mode their display lag ranges from 8.4ms to 35.1ms (8.33 ms is the theorical minimum).
it is indeed, just like your TV latency stuff, which is also entirely irrelevant here since I assume the graphs posted from SF6 are with the TV latency removed, if not I would love to see the TV/Monitor info for the screen they used, as that might change the numbers
The display lag of displays, like the controller lag, are fixed ones and varies for each specific display model and controller model. So I assume that doing some research they could figure out the display lag and controller lag of whaterver they are using in order to isolate the input lag of the game+game engine+os+gaming hardware itself not including there the display lag or controller lag.
But I don't think it's the case because they often indicate the controller being used, which leads to think it also includes the controller lag. And if they don't remove the controller lag I assume they won't remove the dislay lag either.
the fact stands, SF6's input latency numbers (if the measurements are reliable) are BAD for a relatively simple game that runs at 60fps, and is highly competitive.
those 58.3ms (3.5 frames) of latency it has at 120hz on console should be the 60hz Vsync latency, then it would be actually decent.
Yes, measurements are reliable. Or at least these guys and WydD (who doesn't frequently benchmark games anymore) are the reference.
And no, SF6 input delay numbers aren't bad. They are between the best ones seen in its genre in the recent decades, in generations played with LCDs. For modern console fighting games, as shown in the charts 3.38 (120Hz) frames is awesome and 4 frames (in 60Hz) is still really good. As a random example Street Fighter V started with 8 frames of input lag, double than that.
And I'd bet it's also great compared to most other genres in PS4 and PS5 specially in AAA games running at native 4K.
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In Cold Blood
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