I followed up on the wiki article. The citation was a just eurogamer article that had little to with human perception of latency. It did have this nugget: “Criterion said it was aiming for 50ms latency [for burnout paradise]” which agrees with what I’ve heard making handheld electronics. The goal was always <50ms latency.
Personally I noticed a significant improvement switching to a 165hz monitor in basically every first person game. The only difference here is going from 16ms to 6ms frame granularity (10ms off the worst case). I’m not sure how much is visual smoothness or latency, but I’d gladly take refresh rate/fps over UHD.
I’m definitely in the enthusiast group though. I didn’t even realize that console players dealt with such high latency. It will be very interesting to see how the market plays out.
Hm... the topic is quite complex. Human perception is actually much slower than many people want to believe. Parts of the human vision system react no faster than around 1/25th of a second (other parts are faster - its complicated!). Hearing is similarly divided. AFAIK, auditory and visuak stimuli are processed together and merged over a rather large time window (to the point where one system can induce illusions in the other). But we are able to perceive time delays within a complex stimulus with very high precision.
I am not totally convinced that a high refresh rate monitor allows human vision to respond faster. I would rather suspect that most game loops are VSync-locked and a higher refresh rate leads to better input sampling and processing.
Maybe I should set up a simple test where I show a non-interactive sequence at various framerates and ask users to identify the highest framerate. And then repeat with interactive camera controls.
>I am not totally convinced that a high refresh rate monitor allows human vision to respond faster.
Have you ever watched a high-level FPS player? They can aim and shoot in the span of about ~1/5 of a second, occasionally even faster. That's 200ms. At 25hz, that's 40ms. A big part of it is going to be increased input processing, but a lot of it is muscle memory at that skill level. At 165hz, that's 6ms. With two equally skilled players, one will see the other up to a whole 34 ms sooner, in a process that takes about 200ms total. That's going to show up as a highly statistically significant advantage. Of course, the increased sense of connectedness to the game at higher rates is another big advantage, but these effects combine. Pit one skilled shooter against another at equal refresh rates, but with one dealing with 34ms of additional input latency, and they're not going to play as well as they should.
Competitive players explicitly disable vsync, because the higher the game framerate, the faster it processes input. Also, the sooner you see updated information on the screen mid-refresh, but that doesn't help as much as a wholly higher refresh rate.
All of this only matters if cloud gamers were playing against locally-rendered players in the same match though.
There is a reaction delay but it is added on top of all the other delays. If the monitor is delayed by 1/25th of a second and your perception is delayed by 1/25th of a second then the worst case latency is 2/25th of a second. That is a 100% increase in reaction delay. If you think a 100% increase isn't significant what do you think about the 250% (or more) increase that streaming will cause?
I am not arguing against the existence of such an effect. I am loathe to state that the cause is that your eyes see more images per second on screen. I am not convinced that a higher framerate improves perception of the image content when over ~50Hz. I'm rather suspecting that the traditional coupling of game simulation and input processing rates to screen refresh rate is the cause: games seem more responsive because input sampling is more precise when the game loop runs faster.
Personally I noticed a significant improvement switching to a 165hz monitor in basically every first person game. The only difference here is going from 16ms to 6ms frame granularity (10ms off the worst case). I’m not sure how much is visual smoothness or latency, but I’d gladly take refresh rate/fps over UHD.
I’m definitely in the enthusiast group though. I didn’t even realize that console players dealt with such high latency. It will be very interesting to see how the market plays out.