edit: good article.
It does seem poor optimization is to blame for vsync problems.
I seriously wonder if ati, or game programmers care about vsync performance.
Some multiplayer games can be unplayable with it on.
At least nvidia implemented it better in opengl.

I've never had tearing problems, so I just leave it off.

This article completely misses the biggest cause of input lag. It is your brain and nervous system. Age makes the problem worse. Your primary means of fighting this bottleneck is pattern recognition and anticipation. a.k.a experience.

What is more funny is that all modern games have render caps at 60-85FPS. (16.7-11.7 ms response time). Any decent LCD can handle that at their native resolution. The benefit of rendering more than 60-85FPS is overhead.

It was not quite the cause with older titles. Some of them have timing issues where the game goes *faster* then what is should render at and some other strange behaviors. Quake 3: Arena was very infamous (LOLWHAT higher jumping and bunny hopping glitches!) for this until the final patch.

To those who are wondering. Why are games capped at 60-85 FPS? It is combination of practical trade-offs and limitations of display technology. Simply put, fast-paced human-like motion and animation rendered at 60-85FPS is convincing real and fluid. Anything more is a waste of resources.

100+ FPS is better suited for depicting realistic animation of fast moving objects like race cars zooming by at close range. The only catch is that current display technology cannot handle this and only a small portion of games would get tangible benefits from it.

Score two for CRTs - no display lag, most support higher refresh rates than LCDs.

Jesus Christ and all that is unholy, here comes Krogoth again with more of his fake Wikipedia knowledge pulled out of a rusty blender. Goodness save us. Every time there's a piece of tech news somewhere, he twists it until it turns out that you're at fault in something.

Yeah, I have personally seen absolutely crippling lag caused by various scaling and filter settings that are often ENABLED BY DEFAULT by some LCD manufacturers, even when you're operating at their native resolution!

People tear their hair out trying to figure out what's causing this lag, and adjusting the advanced display options through the OSD of their monitor is almost always the last place they look.

Good to see people being made more aware of this problem.

I've got a 24" 1920x1200 Westinghouse P-MVA monitor, and if I set the aspect ratio to "full" instead of "normal", the input lag in FPS games is too frustrating to even bother playing them. Ironically, "normal" is not the default setting. Durrrr. But as long as it's not set to "full", all my games play beautifully with no noticeable input lag, and the graphics card does scaling for non-native resolutions far better than the monitor does, anyway.

I drink therefore I lag.

I must have some serious input lag. Only just noticed this article.

I've always been disappointed that the standard for LCD monitors was 60hz. When gaming on a CRT in yesteryears, the difference between 60hz and 100hz was always noticeable in both flicker AND input lag.

I hope that more monitors like the Samsung 2233RZ pop up, preferably at lower prices :D

for others, it may simply create a borderline imperceptible but nonetheless real disadvantage against players online who have more tightly tuned systems.
Input lag is way down the list of disadvantage in online play. Ping and unstable connections dwarf any sort of lag you might get from your monitor.

Reminds me of Measuring Responsiveness in Video Games by Gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3725/measuring_responsiveness...

The "ridiculously bad scenario" for screen lag is ridiculously bad.
I wonder how long it takes on high-frequency CRT screens where transmission time and display latency are both much lower (or simply a high-frequency LCD).

Really though, the only things you can really tune are getting a good monitor and a 1000 Hz mouse, right?

If your game is choppy due to system inadequacies, then I'm not sure you can chalk it up to input lag.