Comment by blub
5 years ago
Generic statements such as "most people don't care [...] extra 10-100ms for the UI" need to be supported by evidence, especially since those 100ms are added to existing latency and 100ms is considered the threshold where operations feel instantaneous [1].
Still, for certain things 100ms is too much. Android famously had a round-trip audio latency of a bit above 100ms which made it a poor choice for music apps - in contrast to iOS. They now require 20ms in the Android Compatibility Definition Document and admit that musicians require 10ms [2].
In addition to that, hitting the 100ms threshold doesn't mean that lag is not noticeable or not annoying. There was an article about keyboard lag posted on HN a while ago, and the top comment was likewise interesting: https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/audio/audio-latency
Yup. 100ms may be working as "instantaneous" in isolation. If you start chaining interactions, it absolutely isn't.
Once per 100ms means 10 times per second. A game running at 10FPS would be considered unplayable, not just because of choppy rendering, but also because of input lag.