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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. Right now, two franchise giants battle it out for supremacy in this key market: Call of Duty and Battlefield. 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?First off, let's define input lag and how we measure it. Put simply, we define it as the time taken between pressing a button and the resultant action playing out onscreen. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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 method has two advantages: first of all, you no longer need a high-speed camera of any description. You simply capture the analogue component output, and count the frames from there. And secondly, you get sub-frame accuracy on the input phase, allowing for even tighter results.
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