![]() ![]() The truth is that latency has reduced significantly, to the point where both key franchises are handing in sensational results. Clearly the jump to 60fps plays a big part in this, but what happened to Call of Duty with newer titles, and has the situation improved for DICE on even later games? The PS4 release, based on the same engine and running at 60Hz, cut latency down to a highly competitive 63ms. It felt better, but it still wasn't quite good enough. DICE adapted though, and Battlefield 4 - a cross-gen release with both PS3 and PS4 versions - handed in a massively improved 97ms, pretty good for a 30fps game on PS3. Compare that to the 157ms we get from Battlefield 3, a 30fps game with drops below that, and it's clear why one felt tighter to control than the other. Based on the PS3 results (Xbox 360 may be tighter), Modern Warfare 2 produces input latency in the region of 77ms. They're 60Hz titles on current-gen, but back in the day only COD targeted that gold standard in console frame-rate. Now, the two key franchises - Call of Duty and Battlefield - both came to prominence in the last-gen era. Tom presents this video presentation of our first-person shooter latency testing. Obviously, we would like to get more Xbox One tests in there, and hopefully that's something we can return to soon. So, for all of our tests here, with the exception of Halo 5, we've standardised on playing the PS4 versions, using the R2 button to trigger a gunshot. Firing the gun? Well that happens a lot sooner, between three to four frames. So, in Battlefield 1, for example, changing a weapon takes five or six frames from pressing the triangle button to getting a reaction on-screen. ![]() Another thing to bear in mind is that depending on the game, different button presses take different lengths of time to register. With that in mind, we believe the best methodology is to take lots of samples, averaging the numbers out - something Nigel Woodall does himself with the 'report cards' on his Twitter account. It's a brilliant solution to get millisecond accuracy, but results can still vary. And secondly, you get sub-frame accuracy on the input phase, allowing for even tighter results. You simply capture the analogue component output, and count the frames from there. Woodall's method has two advantages: first of all, you no longer need a high-speed camera of any description. Then you simply count the frames between the green bar and the animation kicking in - for our tests, we used the most crucial of actions: firing a weapon. Woodall's equipment converts HDMI to analogue component, then disables two of the components when the button on the controller is pressed, producing a green bar on-screen. Enthusiast Nigel Woodall - a keen fighting game fan - has taken it to the next level with the technology that we use here at Digital Foundry today. It's a great solution, but a little unwieldy and the only way to ascertain precisely when the button is pressed requires investing in a super high-speed camera. It tied LEDs to controller inputs, you pointed a high-speed camera at the board and the display and you simply counted the frames between the LED lighting up and the animation kicking in on-screen. Actually measuring this is challenging: back in the day, we used a latency controller monitor board built by Ben Heck and used by Infinity Ward and others in measuring lag. Put simply, we define it as the time taken between pressing a button and the resultant action playing out onscreen. Which offers the fastest, most responsive controls? And in turn, how to do they compare with other key titles in this most competitive of genres?įirst off, let's define input lag and how we measure it. Right now, two franchise giants battle it out for supremacy in this key market: Call of Duty and Battlefield. Input lag - it's a crucial factor in defining the 'feel' of a game, and especially important for gameplay in the first-person shooter genre. ![]()
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