Does the Switch just have inherently high input lag?

[ASDR]

I really wonder if there's just something fundamentally borked here. I always felt that Switch games are kinda laggy. There's been plenty of reports about individual Switch games having high latency or ports being bad compared to other platforms, i.e.

https://venturebeat.com/2019/06/25/bloo ... c-version/
https://www.polygon.com/2018/12/14/1814 ... tency-feel
http://aresplatoon2controlsfixed.com/

etc.

I simply assumed that's just sloppy ports or maybe weak hardware that frequently struggles to hit 30FPS causing the issue.

But have you noticed how noticeable the input lag is even in the system menu (or any game menu for that matter)? If you listen to the click of the buttons/dpad and the various click/chirp feedback sounds from the system it's obvious how large of a gap there is between the click of the controller and seeing the feedback on the screen / hearing the click from the speakers. That's also present in handheld mode with the build-in screen and the joycons wired, so no TV lag or wireless interference.

That's crazy to me. Traditionally handhelds have always felt super responsive because the hardwired controls and build-in screen prevent many common sources of lag like poor wireless controller connections and slow processing from a TV. Just to make sure I'm not just imagining things I quickly fired up my DS/3DS/PSP/Vita, and the difference just moving through system/game menus is very noticeable. The click from the buttons/DPad and the audio feedback from the system sounds perfectly in-sync or at the very least overlapping.

So again, we've seen plenty of complaints over individual Switch games having high input lag or at least being much worse than on other platforms, but has anybody tried to look into if there's just something fundamentally broken about how the HW/OS handles controller input or A/V output? Instead of looking at the worst-case of a particularly bad game, I think it would be more interesting to look at the best-case. Like if the most basic system menu with wired controller and build-in screen already has significant input lag there would just be no chance to get reasonable results for a 3D game @30FPS-ish played with a wireless controller on a TV.

[gray117]

Almost certainly; I think nintendo got a pass on this shoddy thing because people were joyed up conceptually.

However, things have come to something of a head over the bloodstained release, whether or not the game does a good job in adding to that lag, the mechanics of the game do little to mask the feel of the effect of it, and, probably most significantly, because this was something where a number of people had been looking forward to it specifically on switch, and not having it as their 2nd/3rd portable-extra-version, the outcry has been somewhat more palpable than the discontent rumblings over how, say, shovel knight felt to play. There's also a growing backlash over repeated drift issues on the controllers - even when fixed it's a flaw which will re-occur...

In all fairness I don't think the system menu is necessarily a good indicator - there's often some kind of 2nd priority/layer/access-delay impacting a ui that is intended to run alongside other features such as games (whether or not those other features are running)... but yeah obviously a non-optimal frontend experience is far from ideal... if nothing else you might think they'd mask the feel of that a little more when they're able to to predict that kind of performance. Still, at least it's better than the wii u experience...

[orange808]

Okay. Let's not start trying to understand this issue based on misinformation or oversimplification.

This partially answers your questions:
https://github.com/dekuNukem/Nintendo_S ... gineering/

TODO:
Ideally, you would want to build a custom homebrew app, mod a controller with an LED, and test with a high speed camera. AFAIK, that hasn't been done. Without building a custom homebrew application, you can't properly isolate the software from the equation.

[ASDR]

Almost certainly; I think nintendo got a pass on this shoddy thing because people were joyed up conceptually.

However, things have come to something of a head over the bloodstained release, whether or not the game does a good job in adding to that lag, the mechanics of the game do little to mask the feel of the effect of it, and, probably most significantly, because this was something where a number of people had been looking forward to it specifically on switch, and not having it as their 2nd/3rd portable-extra-version, the outcry has been somewhat more palpable than the discontent rumblings over how, say, shovel knight felt to play. There's also a growing backlash over repeated drift issues on the controllers - even when fixed it's a flaw which will re-occur...

Yeah, let's not forget the broken dpad on the pro controller and the many other build quality issues like the bending of the main unit. It's a neat device, but there are some real issues.

There's been backlash over the terrible input lag of games, but I think some of it might just be a fundamental issue with the system. Games, controllers & TVs add to the problem, but I tried finding the 'most responsive' part of the system and even that seems terrible.

In all fairness I don't think the system menu is necessarily a good indicator - there's often some kind of 2nd priority/layer/access-delay impacting a ui that is intended to run alongside other features such as games (whether or not those other features are running)... but yeah obviously a non-optimal frontend experience is far from ideal... if nothing else you might think they'd mask the feel of that a little more when they're able to to predict that kind of performance. Still, at least it's better than the wii u experience...

Sure, point taken. Maybe the system menu is laggy, but I tried plenty other games and none feel any better. And again, just try out the system menu on a Vita/3DS/DS/PSP/anything, it's night and day. The touchscreen is even worse, try scrolling with your finger, it's like the entire UI is slowly chasing your finger. Do the same on a 3DS, Vita, iPhone, no comparison.

It's just bananas, why have people not been screaming about this since the launch two years ago? In the absolute best-case, wired controllers, build-in screen, just running a menu the Switch feels like consoles feel on my TV with game mode disabled. Now dock the thing, add lag for a wireless controller, TV processing and a <30FPS game and you're probably pushing >100ms. Splatoon 2 has double the lag of its Wii U predecessor. The current Smash is the laggiest of the entire series. Bloodstained is >150ms. I'm not a CRT fanatic and lag generally does not bother me that much, but this just has to be too much...

Okay. Let's not start trying to understand this issue based on misinformation or oversimplification.

This partially answers your questions:
https://github.com/dekuNukem/Nintendo_S ... gineering/

TODO:
Ideally, you would want to build a custom homebrew app, mod a controller with an LED, and test with a high speed camera. AFAIK, that hasn't been done. Without building a custom homebrew application, you can't properly isolate the software from the equation.

That was a fun read, thanks! It doesn't really offer any explanations for the source of the lag, though. It's quite puzzling why a wired controller and a build-in display would already have have so much lag. Of course, maybe just all the software is inherently badly written, triple buffers, doesn't poll the input APIs right, whatever. I'm not going to get into modding my switch or homebrew development, but for starters it would be interesting to hear if anybody can think of a game or other piece of software on the system that doesn't have immediately apparent input lag?

[orange808]

Here are some threads from gbatemp that have invaluable information on this topic, but I only visit that site once a month. The noise to signal ratio there is less than ideal.

Further reading:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/tool-joy-co ... it.478560/

https://gbatemp.net/threads/reverse-eng ... de.475226/

[ASDR]

Here are some threads from gbatemp that have invaluable information on this topic, but I only visit that site once a month. The noise to signal ratio there is less than ideal.

Further reading:

https://gbatemp.net/threads/tool-joy-co ... it.478560/

https://gbatemp.net/threads/reverse-eng ... de.475226/

But the controllers do not show inherent lag when used on other systems, and multi-platform controllers that are fine on other platforms are just as laggy as everything else on Switch. So I don't think looking deeply into the controller itself would be helpful as they're not the problem.

Like you said, it would wonderful to have a simple piece of software that just polls input and blits something on the screen as fast as possible. But simply the fact that even though I played dozens of games on the system I never found one that doesn't have this very noticeable base level of lag makes me think it's not just the actual game software that's at fault. I can imagine either there is some kind of bufferbloat or other issues with the entire input layer of the system that affects all controllers in all modes or there is a part of the rendering pipeline like a scaling or compositing step imposed by the OS that adds significant lag.

No previous handheld system I've seen has this issue.

People have been doing some controller comparisons for Smash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbgQdM6TcEM

Interesting that wireless pro controllers are slower and that the wired GC one is the fastest.

[Ikaruga11]

Does Mario Kart 8 Deluxe have more input lag than it's Wii U counterpart?

[ASDR]

Does Mario Kart 8 Deluxe have more input lag than it's Wii U counterpart?

That would be very interesting to know. Same for New Super Mario Bros U and Breath of the Wild. Maybe Mario Maker 1 vs 2? I own all of these, but unfortunately only on either Wii U or Switch :/

Since both systems have NES emulation, that would also be another potential point worth comparing.

I'd be almost certain that the Switch would fare worse considering what happened to Splatoon/Smash and that even when used with the wireless table there's noticeably less lag in the Wii U menu vs Switch menu.

[Konsolkongen]

I wonder if this doesn't just come down to the games you play?

For me, I haven't noticed any worse lag on the Switch compared to my PS4 or Xbox One, but I never did any comparisons either. I will say that I'm quite sensitive to it, which is why I just picked up Bloodstained on the PS4 today, even though I already own the Switch version (backed it) but found that it feels too sluggish to play.

On the other hand, Mega Man 11 is supposed to have less input lag on the Switch than the PS4-version according to Digital Foundry, so that's why I chose that version. Haven't played it much, but it feels very snappy with a wireless Pro Controller.

I also haven't had any issues playing Sonic Mania to death on the Switch, nor have felt any lag in Mario Maker 2.

OP definitely has a valid point when he mentions 60 vs 30 fps framerates. If a Switch version is 30 fps compared to 60 on the PS4, the frametime will be twice as long, which equals worse controller response.

This isn't really a useful comparison, just thought it was worth mentioning: Comparing two 30fps openworld games like The Witcher 3 and Zelda BotW, I would say that BotW feels better and snappier to play than Witcher 3, which also feels quite nice (provided you turn on alternate movement speed).
In fact I would say that Zelda is probably the snappiest and most responsive 30fps openworld game I've played yet, with Red Dead 2 being the worst

I too would be very interested in seeing proper scientifically measured results of the Switch lag

EDIT: It's worth keeping in mind that high input lag in some titles doesn't necessarily equal laggy hardware. There have been many examples of PS4 titles with high input lag, that had to be patched out by the developers. Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Prey comes to mind. I'm pretty sure that in many cases this is just down to how the games were programmed. Splatoon 2 is much higher resolution on the Switch and looks better too. Maybe the increase in input lag was just necessary to pull of those better graphics?

[ASDR]

I wonder if this doesn't just come down to the games you play?

I've yet to find a single game that doesn't seem to have a rather high level of input lag. That's why I always mentioned menus, like the system menu. Just compare it to another handheld like DS/PSP/Vita/3DS. Handhelds generally are very good in the input lag department due to being all-in-one and not having any TV lag etc. It's day and night, both for the touchscreen and docked joycons. Don't you notice the lag in the system menu? Both visually and the delayed audio? It's not subtle, just listen to the click of the button and the audio feedback from the system, it's a huge gap compared to basically any other system. The UI in BotW feels about the same to me, other games as well. And the kicker for me is that this level of lag would be what I'd expect with a poor wireless controller and a TV that's not terribly fast, but the switch has this level of lag with the build-in screen / low-latency monitor and wired controllers.

What I've been looking for is the best case lag for the switch and to me it seems that the system just has a certain fairly high base level of input latency that never goes away even with the most ideal circumstances. I think this is why there has been so many games where people complained about lag. It's borderline even in the best case, if you then further increase latency with a poor framerate or by messing up your input handling etc. you quickly get to Bloodstained levels of unplayability.

For me, I haven't noticed any worse lag on the Switch compared to my PS4 or Xbox One, but I never did any comparisons either. I will say that I'm quite sensitive to it, which is why I just picked up Bloodstained on the PS4 today, even though I already own the Switch version (backed it) but found that it feels too sluggish to play.

On the other hand, Mega Man 11 is supposed to have less input lag on the Switch than the PS4-version according to Digital Foundry, so that's why I chose that version. Haven't played it much, but it feels very snappy with a wireless Pro Controller.

I also haven't had any issues playing Sonic Mania to death on the Switch, nor have felt any lag in Mario Maker 2.

OP definitely has a valid point when he mentions 60 vs 30 fps framerates. If a Switch version is 30 fps compared to 60 on the PS4, the frametime will be twice as long, which equals worse controller response.

I just finished Youngblood on the Switch, oh boy, that game seems to drop <20FPS @ <480p on every of the big setpiece battles and bossfights. It's laggy as shit and I had to drop the difficulty to the lowest level to finish it. But here I clearly understand why it's laggy. Terrible framerate and who knows what compromises they had to make. What concerns me is the significant lag I still feel in what I'd call best-case scenarios. I can see why Youngblood has lag, I don't get why Picross and the settings menu has it with the build-in screen and wired controllers

This isn't really a useful comparison, just thought it was worth mentioning: Comparing two 30fps openworld games like The Witcher 3 and Zelda BotW, I would say that BotW feels better and snappier to play than Witcher 3, which also feels quite nice (provided you turn on alternate movement speed).
In fact I would say that Zelda is probably the snappiest and most responsive 30fps openworld game I've played yet, with Red Dead 2 being the worst

I'm playing BotW right now (had it for a long time, just never wanted to commit to the >100h game) and it's absolutely playable. I'm really loving the game. But I clearly feel the lag in the menus and when aiming with the right stick. It's OK for that game, but I wouldn't want to play Meat Boy like that.

I too would be very interested in seeing proper scientifically measured results of the Switch lag

All I have is a smartphone that does 240FPS, I guess that might be enough? I could maybe record the dpad click + speaker blip delay just with the mic, that should quite clearly show the button-to-audio latency.

EDIT: It's worth keeping in mind that high input lag in some titles doesn't necessarily equal laggy hardware. There have been many examples of PS4 titles with high input lag, that had to be patched out by the developers. Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Prey comes to mind. I'm pretty sure that in many cases this is just down to how the games were programmed. Splatoon 2 is much higher resolution on the Switch and looks better too. Maybe the increase in input lag was just necessary to pull of those better graphics?

Absolutely. The Witcher & RDR2 have a rather heavy / animation priority / sluggish feel to them, but like you said that has nothing to do with hardware or input lag, that's just how they designed it.

[BrianC]

Not sure how reliable the source is, but I heard the Switch NES games for the online service have less input lag than the games on the NES mini. I heard the M2 ports on switch generally have low input lag, but MMX1 has a horrendous amout of input lag on all consoles in the recent MMX collection. I also heard Thumper has low input lag on switch.

[Konsolkongen]

I'm playing BotW right now (had it for a long time, just never wanted to commit to the >100h game) and it's absolutely playable. I'm really loving the game. But I clearly feel the lag in the menus and when aiming with the right stick. It's OK for that game, but I wouldn't want to play Meat Boy like that.

Right stick aiming in games is perhaps not the best way to judge input lag of a game. I find that in many games (Doom 2016 on PS4 included) the game feel rather sluggish when using the default settings. Often you have to increase the sensitivity of the camera movement, that was definitely the case with Zelda too.

I don't think it's fair to judge the system based on how fast its menus are. Sure I can feel the lag in the Switch menu compared to PS4, but only because you mentioned it
As I said Mega Man 11 supposedly is faster on Switch than PS4, and this just goes to show that you can't blame Bloodstained's lag on the hardware itself, it's down to the programming. Had this been a hardware issue that meant that every game was at least 100+ms compared to other systems I would never have been able to play Sonic Mania on the Switch.

[Syntax]

The use a thing called nx, where they talk to USB via bulk outs. So best way to sum that up is to use, they are not using HID standards.

This could be the cause of input lag on some titles if developers have not coded with nx in mind.

[ASDR]

Right stick aiming in games is perhaps not the best way to judge input lag of a game. I find that in many games (Doom 2016 on PS4 included) the game feels rather sluggish when using the default settings. Often you have to increase the sensitivity of the camera movement, that was definitely the case with Zelda too.

Yep, totally agree. I spend the first few hours in Doom messing with the aiming controls, it has a very sluggish feel to it. Zelda camera is set to 'Fast' as well.

I don't think it's fair to judge the system based on how fast its menus are.

My logic here is that

a.) Nobody designs menus to be sluggish intentionally, while aiming or movement might have a slower, heavier feel by design
b.) Menus should not be straining so there's no good technical reason for them to lag

What would you think is good test? Trigger in an FPS? Jumping?

Sure I can feel the lag in the Switch menu compared to PS4, but only because you mentioned it

Welcome to my world Now compare the laggy feel of the system menu to say the UI in BotW or any other game. It feels about the same. The lag everywhere on the Switch (counterexamples wanted!).

As I said Mega Man 11 supposedly is faster on Switch than PS4, and this just goes to show that you can't blame Bloodstained's lag on the hardware itself, it's down to the programming. Had this been a hardware issue that meant that every game was at least 100+ms compared to other systems I would never have been able to play Sonic Mania on the Switch.

Of course a poor game makes things even worse, but I'm looking for the opposite. What's a game that has LESS lag than the system menu? My idea here is that if we can't find any game, even something as simple as Tetris or Picross that doesn't have clearly noticeable input lag then there's probably something wrong with the Switch on a HW/OS level.

The use a thing called nx, where they talk to USB via bulk outs. So best way to sum that up is to use, they are not using HID standards.

This could be the cause of input lag on some titles if developers have not coded with nx in mind.

So that might explain why wireless controllers are faster than wired ones? Why would developers need to specifically think about this type of low-level detail? I'm having a bit of a hard time Googling for this as NX is of course the old Switch codename and I personally know at least one other piece of software called nx, can you link me somewhere where I can read up on this? Can only find this tool https://gbatemp.net/threads/nx-usb.523122/.

[orange808]

Polling time with wired controllers is a bit strange. Toadking at gbatemp posted the details of the "USB" wired polling cadence.

It has a reliable polling time about every 16ms. There is an additional polling schedule that adds a few scattered occurrences about every 40 milliseconds.

In practice, it works like two reoccurring timers. One every ~16ms and another every ~40ms. When an individual timer expires, the controller is polled, and the expired timer is reset to its default duration (~16ms or ~40ms). (Those are approximates. The additional controller polling always happens at the same time in relation to the "once per frame" ~16ms polling. It doesn't drift.)

Bottom line: Every couple of frames, the Switch will poll the wired controller twice in a frame. Otherwise, it's just one poll per frame for wired.

Edit: I reread the write up and the additional odd controller polling does appear to drift about. (You're better off reading the links, from the people that did the work, than my summary.)

Regardless, it's essentially one controller poll per frame. If I recall correctly, the hardware polls the touchscreen once every 4ms. I don't know what the wireless polling speed is off the top of my head.

AFAIK, the wired USB polling time is the slowest on the device, so the general heresay claims that it "feels" like the controller is only getting polled 20 times a second (or some sh*t like that) is almost certainly software related.

[Konsolkongen]

I don't think it's fair to judge the system based on how fast its menus are.

My logic here is that

a.) Nobody designs menus to be sluggish intentionally, while aiming or movement might have a slower, heavier feel by design
b.) Menus should not be straining so there's no good technical reason for them to lag

I agree, it's terrible when menus feel overly sluggish. But I think that the Switch menu is far off being bad enough that this is a problem
Recently played Rage 2 on PS4, fairly responsive game, but the menus were so bad that I had to take caution not to pass the Inventory-tab as this would halt the game for several seconds each time. I seriously thought the system would crash the first few times I accessed the menus. And on top of that the cursor movement in the menus was incredibly laggy as well. There is no excuse for such a shitty menu, especially in a pretty fast moving game :/

What would you think is good test? Trigger in an FPS? Jumping?

I like the old punch in a fighter personally. Measuring actions on analog triggers probably isn't very reliable due to the movement on these.

The horrible Switch JoyCons make a clicky sound when the buttons are pressed, maybe this sound could be used along with video to accurately measure the lag?

[thebigcheese]

People have been doing some controller comparisons for Smash:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbgQdM6TcEM

Interesting that wireless pro controllers are slower and that the wired GC one is the fastest.

IIRC, some of the USB ports performed better than others. In the case of the wired connections, the issue definitely stems from polling issues. As far as wireless controllers, they connect over Bluetooth, so there is some inherent lag there versus, say, Xbox One which uses a custom wireless solution. In practice, though, there are cases (Mega Man X Legacy Collection) where input lag is worse on Xbox One than Switch. So there is certainly a limit to how low the Switch can go, but in theory that limit is no worse than the PS4 since they both use Bluetooth. Any differences beyond that are going to be down to programming. The Switch is significantly less powerful, so developers loading a lot of processing-intensive effects in games are going to be hurting the lag. But if they optimize better, then there won't be an issue (by comparison to other platforms, at least). So I would not say it is an inherent problem, just a set of potential issues that developers need to account for.

[ASDR]

Polling time with wired controllers is a bit strange. Toadking at gbatemp posted the details of the "USB" wired polling cadence.

It has a reliable polling time about every 16ms. There is an additional polling schedule that adds a few scattered occurrences about every 40 milliseconds.

In practice, it works like two reoccurring timers. One every ~16ms and another every ~40ms. When an individual timer expires, the controller is polled, and the expired timer is reset to its default duration (~16ms or ~40ms). (Those are approximates. The additional controller polling always happens at the same time in relation to the "once per frame" ~16ms polling. It doesn't drift.)

Bottom line: Every couple of frames, the Switch will poll the wired controller twice in a frame. Otherwise, it's just one poll per frame for wired.

Edit: I reread the write up and the additional odd controller polling does appear to drift about. (You're better off reading the links, from the people that did the work, than my summary.)

Regardless, it's essentially one controller poll per frame. If I recall correctly, the hardware polls the touchscreen once every 4ms. I don't know what the wireless polling speed is off the top of my head.

AFAIK, the wired USB polling time is the slowest on the device, so the general heresay claims that it "feels" like the controller is only getting polled 20 times a second (or some sh*t like that) is almost certainly software related.

That doesn't sound so bad, at least it wouldn't explain the level of persistant lag observable on the system. I tried wireless pro-controller + build-in screen, doesn't feel any different than using a low-latency monitor. If you want to see some really bad lag, try dragging the screen anywhere in the Switch system menu...

I agree, it's terrible when menus feel overly sluggish. But I think that the Switch menu is far off being bad enough that this is a problem

But it's already a easily noticeable amount of and that's basically the best case you'll ever see on this device. Sure, it doesn't make the menu 'unusable' by any measure, but why should a console always have such a large baseline of lag? No other device I've seen has this problem. And this is best case! In a real game running @ 30FPS you can add another frame of lag. Playing on a TV, another frame or two of lag. Poorly optimized game, sky is the limit.

The Switch is significantly less powerful, so developers loading a lot of processing-intensive effects in games are going to be hurting the lag. But if they optimize better, then there won't be an issue (by comparison to other platforms, at least). So I would not say it is an inherent problem, just a set of potential issues that developers need to account for.

I don't agree that this is a processing power issue or that it is simply down due to poorly optimized software.

To the first point, no other system besides Switch has this lag issue. Just try a 3DS/DS/Vita/PSP/etc. *None* of these consoles suffer from a persistent amount of lag in every basic menu etc. It's very easy to see in a side-by-side and they're all weaker hardware wise than the Switch. If anything, prior handhelds are known that having less lag than their more powerful consoles brethren due to being all-in-one.

To the second point, I think it is an inherent problem of the Switch since I can't find one single counterexample on the Switch that doesn't have a immediately noticeable level of lag in the best circumstances. On any other handheld all you need to do is turn them on and navigate the system menu to get a good example of a scenario I'd describe as 'no noticeable lag'. Just got the game Sine Mora the other day. Exact same thing, you can feel the lag everywhere from the menu to moving your plane with the dpad.

Basically since every other weaker handheld system seems to have drastically better latency and I can't find a single lag-free game on the Switch, I can only draw the conclusion that there's something fundamentally flawed with how the system handles controller input or AV-output.

[orange808]

Bluetooth polling times aren't inherently always locked to high latency. That is just a choice to improve battery life.

The DS4 controller can perform at ~2ms polling rate over bluetooth with a PC. You can download DS4Windows, enable the touchpad mouse, and verify this yourself. You can set it to 1ms, but the best I've gotten is 2ms.

That is bluetooth and it outperforms Microsoft's controller.


Also:
(This isn't a fanboi post. I'm not interested in arguing about our "favoritest" console. This isn't neogaf!)

Just sharing some information. I'm not addressing anybody specifically, but this is where things often go awry.

[Konsolkongen]

I agree, it's terrible when menus feel overly sluggish. But I think that the Switch menu is far off being bad enough that this is a problem

But it's already a easily noticeable amount of and that's basically the best case you'll ever see on this device. Sure, it doesn't make the menu 'unusable' by any measure, but why should a console always have such a large baseline of lag? No other device I've seen has this problem. And this is best case! In a real game running @ 30FPS you can add another frame of lag. Playing on a TV, another frame or two of lag. Poorly optimized game, sky is the limit.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you here. But I get the impression that you say that input lag can never go lower than a consoles dashboard-menu? Those two things aren't connected.

Sonic Mania's menus are much faster than the Switch dashboard I can't notice any lag at all when jumping in that game in handheld mode.

EDIT: Just dug out my New 3DS and the Sega 3D Classics Collection with the M2 port of Sonic 1 on it, to compare it against the switch port of Sonic 1 (also by M2).

I recorded in slo-mo with my iPhone 7, and pressed jump on both consoles with the same hand, as the same time. I did 3-4 jumps where I was sure I pressed both buttons as precisely as possible, and there is no difference in lag between the two systems.

EDIT 2:

Some images of the lag difference (please take my word that this is the consistant lag I found. My internet is down, so I really don't want to upload a video over 4g).

First image is the M2 ports on both systems. Second image is just for fun, this is the HORRIBLE Sega Megadrive Collection by british developer d3t. This port has insane input lag, noninteger scaling and bad sound. I hope Sega never uses them again

Both shots are of Sonic jumping upwards.
M2:

Spoiler

d3t:

Spoiler

EDIT 3:
Comparing jump-lag in Sonic Mania to Sonic 1 on the 3DS, also shows no difference, meaning that the M2 Sonic 1 and Mania on Switch has the exact same amount of input lag. Not that the two necessarily can be used for comparison. I just found it interesting

[ASDR]

Bluetooth polling times aren't inherently always locked to high latency. That is just a choice to improve battery life.

The DS4 controller can perform at ~2ms polling rate over bluetooth with a PC. You can download DS4Windows, enable the touchpad mouse, and verify this yourself. You can set it to 1ms, but the best I've gotten is 2ms.

That is bluetooth and it outperforms Microsoft's controller.


Also:
(This isn't a fanboi post. I'm not interested in arguing about our "favoritest" console. This isn't neogaf!)

Just sharing some information. I'm not addressing anybody specifically, but this is where things often go awry.

Well, my feelings won't be hurt by numbers. But yes, from what I've read the DS4 has incredibly good latency numbers. Probably part of the reason why even with the 1-2 frames of lag a decent TV adds the PS4 feels snappier to me that the Switch.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you here. But I get the impression that you say that input lag can never go lower than a consoles dashboard-menu? Those two things aren't connected.

No and yes, of course there's no technical reason why the system menu has to be the lower bound, I'm merely saying I've never seen a piece of software that didn't have at least this fairly noticeable level of lag. Like I just posted the other day, my recently acquired Sine More has exactly the same amount of lags for menus & plane movement.

Sonic Mania's menus are much faster than the Switch dashboard I can't notice any lag at all when jumping in that game in handheld mode.

That's good to hear, that's what I've been asking for, a single counterexample that doesn't have very apparent lag! Neat. I really wish I could have half a day with a Switch devkit, would be so interesting to know why even many really simple games and stuff like menus show this level of lag.

EDIT: Just dug out my New 3DS and the Sega 3D Classics Collection with the M2 port of Sonic 1 on it, to compare it against the switch port of Sonic 1 (also by M2).

I recorded in slo-mo with my iPhone 7, and pressed jump on both consoles with the same hand, as the same time. I did 3-4 jumps where I was sure I pressed both buttons as precisely as possible, and there is no difference in lag between the two systems.

EDIT 2:

Some images of the lag difference (please take my word that this is the consistant lag I found. My internet is down, so I really don't want to upload a video over 4g).

First image is the M2 ports on both systems. Second image is just for fun, this is the HORRIBLE Sega Megadrive Collection by british developer d3t. This port has insane input lag, noninteger scaling and bad sound. I hope Sega never uses them again

Both shots are of Sonic jumping upwards.
M2:

Spoiler

d3t:

Spoiler

EDIT 3:
Comparing jump-lag in Sonic Mania to Sonic 1 on the 3DS, also shows no difference, meaning that the M2 Sonic 1 and Mania on Switch has the exact same amount of input lag. Not that the two necessarily can be used for comparison. I just found it interesting

M2 should know what they're doing, so if anybody makes sure to get low input lag it would be them. Thanks for making this test, that's super interesting. I'm waiting to borrow a decent USB mic so I can easily try the controller click vs UI click latency test. I guess I could just record a video on the iPhone and then strip the audio and load it up in Audacity for analysis, but that seemed like a PITA vs just directly recording on the computer. Not sure if audio latency is a good measure, but it should be interesting to have a number better than my "it's clearly laggy" feeling.

[BONKERS]

Almost certainly; I think nintendo got a pass on this shoddy thing because people were joyed up conceptually.

However, things have come to something of a head over the bloodstained release, whether or not the game does a good job in adding to that lag, the mechanics of the game do little to mask the feel of the effect of it, and, probably most significantly, because this was something where a number of people had been looking forward to it specifically on switch, and not having it as their 2nd/3rd portable-extra-version, the outcry has been somewhat more palpable than the discontent rumblings over how, say, shovel knight felt to play. There's also a growing backlash over repeated drift issues on the controllers - even when fixed it's a flaw which will re-occur...

In all fairness I don't think the system menu is necessarily a good indicator - there's often some kind of 2nd priority/layer/access-delay impacting a ui that is intended to run alongside other features such as games (whether or not those other features are running)... but yeah obviously a non-optimal frontend experience is far from ideal... if nothing else you might think they'd mask the feel of that a little more when they're able to to predict that kind of performance. Still, at least it's better than the wii u experience...

Bloodstained has more to do with UE4 than anything. UE4 games typically already have higher than average input lag. Many UE4 based fighting games have been shown to have 100+ms of lag. (similar to Smash ) And those run at 60FPS. So for a game running on that engine, having to be chopped up to run on mobile hardware at 30FPS. Lag is not going to be good by default. Running the PC version at 30FPS feels significantly worse than at 60FPs but there are things you can do OS/Driver/3rd party software wise to make 30FPS feel good enough.


I will say, I have noticed that a lot of Hamster released Arcade games seem to have a ton of lag. And the Joy cons if they are struggling to make a connection or have interference can be extremely laggy when used wirelessly. (I hate those damn controllers).

Playing with pro-controllers or a BT Power-A GCN controller in games like Wild Guns and Diablo 3, the latency doesn't feel any worse than other versions of those games to me. Never have felt the latency has held me back.


The system menu is probably just laggy because Nintendo doesn't care. I mean the damn thing is ugly and is only 720p even when docked. It has never felt like a high priority and I felt the Wii U was far more responsive and better looking in it's UI.

[ASDR]

UE4 games typically already have higher than average input lag.

Yeah, I've heard that. Maybe all the temporal reconstruction going on is driving up input latency. It's really a shame, we're finally at a point where wireless controllers can be really low lag and where even good TVs are down to ~1 frame of latency and we get stuff like VRR into HDMI but now game engines are so terribly programmed that we have like ~5 frames of latency just inside the game's rendering pipeline.

I will say, I have noticed that a lot of Hamster released Arcade games seem to have a ton of lag. And the Joy cons if they are struggling to make a connection or have interference can be extremely laggy when used wirelessly. (I hate those damn controllers).

Yeah, don't buy Hamster & don't use Joycons.

The system menu is probably just laggy because Nintendo doesn't care. I mean the damn thing is ugly and is only 720p even when docked. It has never felt like a high priority and I felt the Wii U was far more responsive and better looking in it's UI.

The menu is pretty bad and I also noticed the 720p thing. It's bizarre that even features the 3DS had like themes and messaging and folders for games etc. are still missing years after the Switch launch, they just don't care. But none of the older consoles has the lag issue either, 3DS, DS, WiiU menus are all perfectly responsive.

You gotta love and hate Nintendo. On the one hand we suffer from their ineptitude, but on the other hand they'll likely never turn into one of those always-online, live game, microtransaction companies like EA because they're just too damn clueless about the internet and accounts and system level features. God bless them.

[BrianC]

I generally hear the opposite for Hamster games. Is there a place online that shows an input lag test for them? Some of the games with input lag got fixed in an update. Vs. SMB had noticeably less lag after an update to both the game and the switch controllers. Before the update to the pro controllers, I wasn't able to pass 6-3 reliably, but afterwards I could pass it more consistently

I did hear that a different developer did the NeoGeo titles than many of the standard ACA games. Oddly enough, Strikers 1945 Plus had odd slowdown similar to a custom FBA revision used for Fightcade 2 and retroarch (prior versions had odd slowdown and unresponsive controls, but this version had odd slowdown with more responsive controls). This was later fixed, but makes me wonder about the emulation source.

I don't know about the input lag, but was definitely not impressed by the resolution of the Switch menus. It looks especially ugly on a 4k TV.

I don't get Nintendo's inconsistency with menus and features either. It really puzzles me how Wii allowed for running games off the SD card after an update, but DSi games still need to be stored in the system memory to be played on 3DS.

[ASDR]

I just played some Fire Emblem Three Houses for the first time. Exact same very noticeable input lag in the menu as everywhere else on the Switch. I've never seen a Fire Emblem game with laggy menus. I don't think that every single Switch game developer has suddenly forgotten how to make responsive games (I don't understand how you even make a simple game menu laggy, like how, it would seem more work than to just make it react without delay?), there simply must be something fundamentally wrong with the Switch for every single thing to have this base level of easily noticeable lag.

[Konsolkongen]

As I said. This is not true. Sonic Mania has much less lag in its menus.