Video card latency (lag)

[ZenOps]

Nvidia seems to have finally admitted to secret that both makers have known for a while.

They can actually reduce videocard lag by removing a framebuffer in Maxwell architecture chips (750/Ti and 9xx series)

Conspiracy: I get the feeling the Xbone defaults to a setting that actually causes more input and/or output (upscaler) lag than the Xbox 360. By "fixing" the visual quality of the upscaler in the Xbone, they have introduced noticeable lag in perceptive twitch gamers.

[CompletelyNumb]

If only I had a pre-WWII nickel for every time a video card's framebuffer interfered with my gaming...

[ZenOps]

Haha, I didn't even bother moving from windows XP for the longest time because it was easier to overlock my mouse polling to 500hz (from the default 125hz)

Mathematically, that was only a 6 millisecond improvement but it always felt like more than that to me.

10+ millisecond is ginormous by my standards.

Removing the extra framebuffer can introduce visual tearing, but if the tearing occurs at greater than 60 to 120fps its not even ever going to be displayed on a HDMI attached monitor anyhow. Its really only possible to safely remove the framebuffer in games that would otherwise be rendered at 60+FPS. If the game renders 120+ FPS with certainty, it should be possible to not only get rid of the triple buffer, but also get rid of a double buffer and go direct stream.

[ZenOps]

Hardware canucks got their high end Samsung in:



Reviewer here has a SLI rig, and mentions that there is noticeable latency (lag)

SLI has to add an extra framebuffer and overhead, so its going to always feel a little sluggish compared to a single card solution. Having 60 FPS is nice, but its starting to pale if the latency is so high you are always a half second behind the action.

Getting down that latency is a combination of all components, the one that is struggling right now is the 4K upscaler on which some cheap TV's adds a solid 100 milliseconds.