Comment by helsinkiandrew
5 years ago
This is interesting but perhaps shows that keyboard/screen latency isn't as important as it once was.
Just about every application on Apple 2e relied on keypresses being shown on the screen. Modern devices and operating systems are displaying 'windows', streaming 3d graphics etc. and running a myriad of other services at the same time.
Sure, the computer is doing a lot more. Apps are still responding to key presses or mouse clicks though. Fortnite, AutoCad or Excel: I press a button I want to see the effect. Increasing delay strictly reduces your ability to control the system via feedback.
Even in a mostly passive app like a video player, it sucks if the play/pause button has a long-delayed effect. The tendency is to press the button over and over and feel correctly that we have lost control of the app.
Maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing, do we have high speed games today as we used to, e.g. [1]? If game developers assume shitty hardware and software, they won't make things that require better latency.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1TDNliM99U
First of all, Quake III was released in 1999 - that's way after the low-latency days already.
Secondly, not every PC in 1999 was capable of even running QIII (let alone at a high frame rate).
During the days of true low-latency gaming, actual game frame rates were in the low 20s and even consoles rarely achieved 50 or 60 fps.
The link was to an OSP Tourney Q3A mod playing Clan Arena mode, which was released later and became popular even later with better hardware available (another competitive mod was CPMA). You are right on one thing though, default configuration was in 20s of fps on a typical machine of the time and was in fact unplayable, so people had to configure game graphics to simplify it a lot to get high enough framerate, it was basically doom-like looking graphics, no effects, no textures, no shadows, etc.
If a game was playable at 20s of fps, I don't think it deserves a title of low-latency gaming.