How much lag is too much?

[ThunderCat]

With Nebulous Gaming in NY recently changing out their CRT screens in favor of HDTV's, it got me wondering: How much lag is too much?

The new screens now have around 10-20 frames of lag, which may or may not seem inconsequential depending on your school of thought.

CRT's have been a staple of Melee for so long but as time passes these devices will become increasingly few and far between. At some point players won't have much of a choice, which brings us back to my question of how much lag do you believe to be acceptable and where does the lag become game breaking?

 

[Kimble]

Even ten frames is enough to mess up L cancel timings (7 frame windows) and shot hops. I guess no lag is really ideal. CRTs have worked well enough to this point.

 

[ThunderCat]

Even ten frames is enough to mess up L cancel timings (7 frame windows) and shot hops. I guess no lag is really ideal. CRTs have worked well enough to this point.

In retrospect 10-20 frames of lag does seem kinda OD..

 

[20XXwingleborgXxx]

Nothing more than 2 frames is good!

 

[Stride]

Where are you getting your numbers from? 10 to 20 frames of lag is unplayable; I'm assuming you misread something since 0.1 to 0.2 frames would be much more realistic values that you'd get from a proper LCD monitor setup (not just a HDTV setup, which is always going to have unacceptable amounts of lag). No competitive Smash tournament would ever use setups as laggy as the ones you're suggesting.

As long as the level of lag is standardised and reasonably low, it doesn't really matter what it is. The standard right now is the level of lag achieved with a CRT TV (assuming no extra lag from post-processing and such) running the game from a Wii or GameCube. Anything which deviates from that standard to the point where it causes a significant difference in gameplay (whether it's immediately noticeable or not) shouldn't be accepted, nor should anything with so much lag that it interferes with the game even when the players are used to it (because additional lag reduces the reaction windows for everything). Since even deviations in lag of under 1 frame have a significant effect, the margin for acceptable amounts of lag is very small.

I'm told it is currently possible to get monitor setups with low enough amounts of lag that it's a negligible difference from a standard CRT setup, and are therefore acceptable to use; more Smash scenes are starting to use those. Even if it weren't possible, if the amount of lag achieved using the monitors was the standard (in other words: if everyone used those setups) then they would be acceptable to use, since everyone would be used to them.

Not all monitor setups are acceptable (you need certain monitors and certain analogue to digital signal converters). I wouldn't trust one at a tournament unless it had been tested and confirmed to be okay.

 

[Sutekh]

10-20 frames of display lag in a competitive setting is absurd, 20 frames is a third of a second. I notice the one frame difference between Project M and Melee, it would be impossible to have a seriously competitive tournament with 10 frames of display lag. The world's CRT supply isn't running low, the Melee scene could triple overnight and it still wouldn't be a problem. There's a reason why you can find CRTs on craigslist for $10.

 

[-ACE-]

Crazy they're switching to HD imo.

I normally chaingrab spacies with Ganon. I could kiss that goodbye with an extremely small amount of lag.

 

[Dolla Pills]

You might mean 10-20 ms of lag but even that is quite a lot. I play on a CRT monitor with like .000043 ms of lag or whatever just to put it in perspective

 

[Sutekh]

Are you part of the NY scene or did you read about this somewhere? If they had a press release on it, I'd like to read it.

 

[Kadano]

Jesse Hertz on Twitter: "@Kadano LMAO no that was our april fools joke @emilywaves someone actually took us seriously"

10-20 ms is a somewhat likely figure, but not little enough to be called lagless without any problems.

 

[hectohertz]

yeah this was an april fools joke. we said they had 10-20 frames of lag, which might throw off your timing, but they look really good, so its okay.

im honestly shocked this got this far

 

[Kadano]

we said they had 10-20 frames of lag, which might throw off your timing, but they look really good, so its okay.

Hahaha, oh wow. That was a great one.

 

[ThunderCat]

Yo.. tell me how hard I just got trolled.. holy f@ck..

 

[ThunderCat]

Nobody take me seriously anymore, somebody get a moderator and ban my ass from the boards..