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Comment by giveita

6 days ago

Windows (or anything) is nice when its fast. Most things should work in under 20ms so I don't notice a delay.

17 comments

giveita

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gloosx  6 days ago

20ms is faster than a fly reaction time, it's about the same time which 60HZ monitor takes to refresh the frame, 10 times faster than a typical human's reaction.

Everything under 150 ms is pretty much indistinguishably fast to a normal person.

  • mock-possum  6 days ago

    I uh guess I’m not a normal person then

    Working with soft synths, the difference between 65ms, to 15ms latency, 8ms latency, and 2ms latency - time from pressing the key to speakers emitting the sound - is agonizingly noticeable.

    The numbers I’m quoting are ones I remember from various gear and upgrades over the years. It’s crazy to think about the levels of latency I was stuck with when I was a poor college kid. These days I wouldn’t settle for more than 10ms latency, and I don’t have to, thank the maker.

    • gloosx  5 days ago

      I would say when working with synths, the difference between 15ms and 2ms is just swing, it is noticeable but it doesn't feel wrong, just makes things more interesting.

      When a drummer plays drums all the hits are off-timing 10-40ms, and it is still considered natural-sounding swing, if it is agonisingly noticeable for you – you have a quite robotic sense of rhythm, it's very subjective after all.

  • majewsky  6 days ago

    If this were true, then a 10fps movie clip would be indistinguishable from a 24fps or a 60fps one. I have written several years ago about how optimizing my shell prompt from 50ms to 5ms was definitely a noticeable impact on how snappy the shell felt: https://xyrillian.de/thoughts/posts/latency-matters.html

    • gloosx  6 days ago

      The context was about UI interactions, not at all about movie clip which is a totally different thing.

    • Lorkki  6 days ago

      I've occasionally spent time doing and even fighting for latency optimisations that supposedly don't matter in the great scheme of things, but that resulted in customers leaving positive feedback about how the product is noticeably more responsive and/or feels more polished than the competition in those specific areas. It can definitely make a difference.

  • supermatt  6 days ago

    Reaction is not the same as perception. The typical human perceptual threshold is around 16ms, although persistence of vision "smooths" that out to around 40ms.

  • Etherlord87  6 days ago

    You're wrong. You can clearly see a difference between 20ms reaction time (as instantaneous as it gets because of what you say, 1/60 = 16.6666...), whereas 150 ms is a fast reaction but it definitely is a noticeable lag. I wish your opinion didn't exist because how can we expect to get rid of the lag everywhere if some people even claim it doesn't matter.

    • gloosx  6 days ago

      Well, most of this sub 150ms lag everywhere in the interfaces is actually artificially designed, and believe it or not, some people do prefer it like this, so it's being designed like this. I'm personally for making everything as fast as it would be, but for most people it really doesn't matter.

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