Lagency
- Thread starter The Wooster
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This has always irked me since 2004 when I started to play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, I was slowly but steadily learning about all the PC slang terms and even back then people used "lag" both because they legitimately had some connection problems, or because they were so fucking stupid to still use a Pentium 3 and a Matrox video card to play the game.
Duck, Eliot (or whatever that guy's name is)! When she pulls the trigger! There's a delay in the bullet when it passes through her brains. A lag, if you will.
QFT.Whoracle said:
Another type of lag that's often hardware related(though sometimes it's netcode), is hitching, kind of like a stutter in the gameplay. It's a frequent death sentence in badly optimized competitive FPS games, such as Planetside 2, for the first few months at least.
Well, that ending took me by surprise, sort of. Maybe I was sort of ready for it since this was Critical Miss.
I also find it annoying when people don't use the correct usage (as i define it) of words, and that includes lag. However i find this attitude of correcting other peoples usage of words even more annoying.
There is nothing 'wrong' with using lag to describe any decrease in performance which causes delays between input and output. The literal definition for lag is a period of time between two events and so it is perfectly acceptable to use it to talk about general decreases in performance, even for off-line games in that context. Additionally, the meaning conferred by using the word 'lag' to discuss general decreases in performance is understood in this context, even if you don't like them using the word 'lag' to convey that meaning, the meaning has still been conveyed to you, and hence it served it's purpose.
Words evolve and language is always changing. Just because you know the term 'lag' from Counter-strike doesn't mean you own it for everyone else.
There is nothing 'wrong' with using lag to describe any decrease in performance which causes delays between input and output. The literal definition for lag is a period of time between two events and so it is perfectly acceptable to use it to talk about general decreases in performance, even for off-line games in that context. Additionally, the meaning conferred by using the word 'lag' to discuss general decreases in performance is understood in this context, even if you don't like them using the word 'lag' to convey that meaning, the meaning has still been conveyed to you, and hence it served it's purpose.
Words evolve and language is always changing. Just because you know the term 'lag' from Counter-strike doesn't mean you own it for everyone else.
yep. But as the game programmer in me would like to say, (especially the part that deals with VR)
Lag, (or if you want to be technical, latency) also describes the delay between the player giving some control input, and the display showing the effects of it.
Framerate defines what the minimum input lag will be, though often the input lag is much higher than that.
At 100 fps, each frame lasts 10 ms. So you will never have less latency than that. but, it takes your computer 10 ms to draw the frame. In their current configuration, it also takes your monitor 10 ms, and it cannot draw a frame until your pc has finished rendering it. so, that's 20 ms.
If the game runs input in a seperate thread, then it's bumped up to 30 ms. finally, it takes time for the signal to get from the pc to the display, and for the display circuitry to process the image.
how much time is hard to say, but this extra time is why HDTV'S need a 'game' mode, because they often do a lot of image processing using other settings, which can easily delay the process another 50-100ms
so, at 100fps you may find the input latency is 50-60ms, much larger than the Framerate alone would suggest.
Lag, (or if you want to be technical, latency) also describes the delay between the player giving some control input, and the display showing the effects of it.
Framerate defines what the minimum input lag will be, though often the input lag is much higher than that.
At 100 fps, each frame lasts 10 ms. So you will never have less latency than that. but, it takes your computer 10 ms to draw the frame. In their current configuration, it also takes your monitor 10 ms, and it cannot draw a frame until your pc has finished rendering it. so, that's 20 ms.
If the game runs input in a seperate thread, then it's bumped up to 30 ms. finally, it takes time for the signal to get from the pc to the display, and for the display circuitry to process the image.
how much time is hard to say, but this extra time is why HDTV'S need a 'game' mode, because they often do a lot of image processing using other settings, which can easily delay the process another 50-100ms
so, at 100fps you may find the input latency is 50-60ms, much larger than the Framerate alone would suggest.
Except in MMOs where they are both called lag cos the cause is irrelevant, either way you have slow performance.
A low framerate is not lag per se. Random rendering delays are lag. I think when someone is talking about "lag" with regards to bad performance of a game, they're referring to rendering delays. You know, when for 0.1s the whole game just freaks out and either stops rendering or renders incomplete scenes, which is far more noticable and annoying than a constant low framerate.
Boy those were the days. I play a lot of Battlefield because it is still the closest thing to Enemy Territory I have found. After Brink I have all my fingers and toes crossed that Dirty Bomb will be a return to form for Splash Damage.SupahGamuh said:
Anyway lag is lag it isn't network exclusive.
OMG, you liked Enemy Territory too!??octafish said:
Yeah, I was so freaking bummed with Brink... The closest thing I've found to ET so far might be Red Orchestra 2, I mean, you can't rocket jump, bunny hop or spam "NEED A MEDIC!" like a million times, but it's a pretty heavily team driven WW2 game with drivable tanks
Also Tribes: Ascend is pretty awesome too, it's a shame there's not many people playing it nowadays, but it's not hard to find a decently sized match at almost any hour.
Latency: the time it takes for your commands to go through the interwebs
Video lag: the loss/delay of reactions due to your computer being slow as hell, closer to packet loss in behavior. Note that a lot of the "lag" comes from the game moving on past what's displayed on your screen, making you play FROM THE PAST
Input lag: The time it takes for an action to register as being sent, mostly human caused as it's your reaction time
Video lag: the loss/delay of reactions due to your computer being slow as hell, closer to packet loss in behavior. Note that a lot of the "lag" comes from the game moving on past what's displayed on your screen, making you play FROM THE PAST
Input lag: The time it takes for an action to register as being sent, mostly human caused as it's your reaction time
If I use the term lag when it comes to framerates I do say "framelag" because, as a PC user since before there were multiplayer online games, I do know the difference. However I believe "framelag" to be a very viable and useful term because I get spikes of said "framelag" sometimes during games because my PC decides to do something I forgot to turn off (like antivirus) and suddenly my frames drop. Hence why I call it "framelag". Also happens in large scale MMO raids when my admittedly mid-range PC just can't handle all the shit thats going on during certain phases.
So framerates and lag can be used together, just make sure one does not mistake shit latency and a drop in framerates.
So framerates and lag can be used together, just make sure one does not mistake shit latency and a drop in framerates.