To clarify things a bit: No CRTs should lag. Even the large ones. I have a 65" CRT in my living room. It doesn't lag. If you care why, keep reading.
I'm pretty sure that all flat-screen TV's except for like some weird special $10,000 ones that they use in hospitals or some **** have at least a frame of lag.
Funny story about Hostpital TVs. The ones that they have in patient rooms, I have no idea why, but at all of the last several hospitals I've been to recently (my grandma's been going to a lot of different places recently), they
always have the worst possible picture quality I've ever seen on a TV before lol.
I know exactly what CRT and LCD means. With "flat panel" i mean any digital display with a fixed resolution, which is mostly LCD. They have to digitally process the image so that it can be displayed.
This "digital processing" takes 2 forms: 1) deinterlacing: Most digital displays are progressive displays, meaning that to put an interlaced signal (anything via composite) the display has to actually wait for more of the signal before it can display the current frame. There are several different methods of doing this that usually add around 17 or 34ms of delay. This is the main factor in lag on TVs, and an interlaced (read: CRT) TV does not have this problem. 2) upscaling: To take an image at one resolution and display it at another resolution (in the most quality/cost effective method) takes 2 cubic calculations per pixel, something that's a non-trivial operation to do for an embedded processor @ 1920x1080. Therefore, there are often shortcuts taken in designing TVs to use cheaper methods that get the job done after a some time (they can keep up with the signal, but they have some signal propagation delay). Since all digital TVs have a fixed resolution, any other source must be converted into their native resolution, and when cheaper methods are used, this instantiates delay. A TV with a native resolution of 480i/p will not generate this problem, furthermore, CRTs don't actually have a fixed resolution, so this is never a problem for them.
The speed of the panel itself (the "ms" number you often see) is often meaningless, because it's so small compared to all the other stuff that's never mentioned.
I'm assuming you're referring to the panel's response time, which is actually a measurement of how quickly it can change color, and is mostly used for determining if any ghosting will occour. This really has no impact on display lag, as even if it were in a range where you could easily tell (i.e. a 16ms response time), sure, your picture would be a bit slower, but you'd also be seeing a hard blend of 2 frames at any given time and would have trash picture quality.
I don't know what CRTs do to make them lag, but they do something, because they do lag =).
For the above mentioned reasons, CRTs don't lag. Almost always. I suppose it's possible to make one that does, but that would basically cost more, and you'd be designing it specifically to do that.
But since it can sometimes be fixed by finding some optimum setting for brightness/contrast/sharpness, I'm guessing that's the key.
This really has nothing to do with display lag. Have you ever heard of the placebo effect?
Maybe some ye-old b&w TVs don't lag because they didn't try to do anything to the image, but they probably don't even have the right inputs...
ye-old color TVs, ye-old HTDVs, and ye-old every other CRT process the signal in almost the exact same way. Also, it's pretty easy to build a composite -> RF bridge, in case you'd prefer to play on a BW TV to make you feel better.
And it's not an NTSC/PAL thing. In my experience, TVs on american tournaments generally lag more.
TVs that lag should lag about the same. If anything, PAL TVs should lag a tiny bit more because they'd need to wait longer to deinterlace the frames, and have more pixels to upscale. While I'm sure this difference is measurable, it probably doesn't even amount to a whole extra frame on an NTSC TV, and thus is negligible.
About the "console lag"... because Melee sometimes drops frames (for example 4 players on FoD, or when many people die at the same time), I'm going to assume that most of the time the game is pretty close to dropping frames, meaning each frame takes a little under 1/60 seconds to render by the GPU.
To be fair, on this point I could very much be wrong, cause I haven't looked at it in depth. But from memory and the memory of some consultants, Melee doesn't actually drop frames. It does slow down. If it did drop frames, it would actually need to predicatively opt to not draw those frames (i.e. the designers would have to had specified when the game can't handle it and tell it to drop frames there).
Add the time required for the CPU (which is faster because the game never slows down), and these probably add up to about 1/60 seconds.
That's not how game rendering works. It's not if the gpu is slow frames are dropped and if the cpu is slow there's slow down. There's a rendering mechanism that decides how things are rendered. In Melee's case (This varies by game), it uses a fixed framerate rendering method, where it always performs 1/60 of a second's worth of calculation + rendering each frame (I'm tempted to say that on PAL this is 1/50 of a second, but this would actually change game mechanics, so it might be 1/60th quantized to 1/50th for display).
There's your first frame of lag. The actual input from the controller IIRC updates at a much higher rate, so it's negligible.
The controller doesn't actually update at a higher rate, it's polled at one point during each frame, so inputs that last less than a frame risk being dropped. Furthermore, when you input, say, a jab, the frame that the console receives this input, it starts doing the first frame of a jab. This has the result of a 1 frame duration action being displayed ~ 1 Frame after you input it, so there isn't actually any delay generated by this process.
Now when the frame is ready, it can't be sent to the display right away, because it has to be synced with the actual output. This alone adds an average of half a frame of lag. But most likely the frame is copied onto some kind of buffer/queue which takes even longer. Ever heard of double or triple buffering? They are used in many computer games to reduce tearing.
As I've indicated, Melee (and most other console games) use a fixed timestep game loop that is synced with the display, so this actually isn't needed. Melee probably does use double buffering, but because the render step is already the same length as the refresh rate, it doesn't add any additional delay. Double/Tripple buffering only add delay when the rendering framerate differs from the display framrate.
Note that this is just my "educated guess", as I have never actually looked into the details of how the Gamecube works...
Nor how game rendering/ processing work, nor how digital nor CRT TVs work, nor really anything you mentioned.
