it's not always possible to run an HDMI cable directly from your source device
to your tv sometimes it might have to pass through a sound bar or an av
receiver or even a capture device if you're into game streaming now some of
those devices are advertised as having zero latency meaning that in theory your
gaming experience will be exactly as responsive as if you were connected to
your tv directly but others like this av receiver make no
mention of latency whatsoever so are
devices like this or this or this
silently damaging your gaming experience in this video sponsored by vizio we'll
be finding out once and for all
latency or input lag is the amount of time it takes between when we physically
click a button or move the mouse to seeing the action on the screen and when
this latency is really high it can significantly delay your reaction to
let's say an enemy or a sharp turn in the road and as we found in our
investigation in 2019 even if you can't
feel the delay your brain can and modern technology hasn't yet reached the point
where it's fast enough that it doesn't make any difference bottom line then we
want our latency to be as low as possible for the best gaming experience
so here's our test setup vizio who sponsored this video provided
their 65-inch m7 series quantum 2020 tv
and we're going to be testing it at 4k 60hz with game mode enabled and auto low
latency disabled since not all of our devices support it now our tings great
site check them out found that this was the lowest input lag configuration on
this tv at less than 10 milliseconds now
let's meet some of the other items in our chain for capture cards we've got a
couple different ones from elgato including this hd60s plus that they
claim that if you pass through this with your signal so that you can actually
capture it for your game stream or whatever else there is no difference
between being plugged in here and being plugged in here very interesting and
we've got this receiver if you're not familiar a receiver like this is great
for having many devices plugged into a single tv or you can actually have
multiple zones on some of the high-end ones and it has an amplifier built into
it if you have like a dedicated passive speaker set up for surround sound
but what's interesting about it is that the manufacturer in this case and
actually most of them doesn't mention latency
at all the final piece of the chain is the m
series 5.1 sound bar from vizio and vizio's main highlights for this are its
low profile charcoal black design full support for dolby atmos and dtsx and its
nine high performance speakers with a six-inch wireless subwoofer for an
outstanding surround sound experience of course if we're going to be adding these
devices sometimes more than one of them to our HDMI chain we can't rely on our
tings data we need to capture our own and that is where
this guy comes in we explored NVIDIA's latency display analysis tool or ldat in
this video here but to save you some time what it does is it actually
intercepts the signal from a mouse click then it measures the delay between this
device here receiving that signal and measuring a brightness change on the
monitor that gives us the latency of the entire
gaming chain any bets by the way uh which common household items are gonna
add the most lag the avr receiver the uh
analog telephone the LTT CPU pillow
lttstore.com before we can know that we need to
establish a baseline so in the interest of reducing bottlenecks we're using a
high performance gaming system with a 3900xt processor and 2080 super graphics
card and while i'll be trying to feel
the difference using an actual game in this case cs go
all of the data that we present to you was captured using NVIDIA's ldap desktop
application to eliminate any variability due to game engine leg is that bot's
name loser wait was that one's name oh lester
well yep that feels like some pretty low
input leg good job physio i guess
hey oh nice he's dead look at that okay
feels pretty good and good news the data backs it up we found that the most
consistent method to measure it was to click manually in the ldap window rather
than using the automatic clicking function and we measured just shy of 40
milliseconds of total click to light photon delay that
sounds like a lot compared to arting's number but it's actually right in line
with what we've measured on high performance desktop gaming monitors
Windows graphics card drivers etc just
add a lot more delay than a signal generator so obviously then our first
step was to add vizio's own sound bar to the chain with a baseline delay of just
under 38 milliseconds the sound bar added 19 milliseconds of delay which is
about one frame at 60 hertz when casually gaming to most people this
wouldn't be noticeable but if you're really competitive what we learned is
you better use the e-arc feature of your new tv and sound bar and plug your
console directly into the tv and have that audio pass through to your soundbar
okay then vizio didn't claim that there was zero
latency in their soundbar though what about something that does the elgato
4k60 pro and hd60s plus are both capture
cards that claim super low latency and from our results this definitely holds
true for them with this setup the hd60s plus only added three to four
milliseconds of delay on average and the 4k60 pro added 19 milliseconds which is
one frame and comparable to the sound bar so again it's acceptable for gaming
but um it isn't
zero latency either what about the receiver well it's
comparable to the hd60s plus with only an additional three milliseconds of
delay which that's quite impressive when the product page doesn't claim any kind
of gaming or latency optimization as a selling point at all now it's time for
the big test if we start chaining these devices together does the total delay
become the sum of the individual delays
or will they multiply will they work at all well it does work
sometimes introducing extra links between the tv
and the input device can have mixed results not just with latency but
actually with signal reliability just getting all four of our test devices
between the tv and our pc to handshake with each other was a challenge with
some configurations defaulting to unusual resolutions some of them
flickering and some of them not working at all in the right order though we were
able to get things up and running without any issues with just two capture
cards in a row we don't actually see much difference from just the 4k60 pro
on its own and when everything is changed together we see latency that is
very similar again to just the 4k60 pro
or the soundbar on its own which kind of raises questions like
what is going on here what it seems like is there's something of a limit to how
much additional delay can be added by devices that are changed together as for
why that would be honestly it's a little above my pay
grade but if i were to make a guess i would say that it's probably something
to do with digital oh
i put dhcp in the script instead of hdcp
so it like it tripped me up yeah yeah it was not a networking video okay but if i
were to guess i'd say it's probably something to do with hdcp or copy
protection we weren't able to prove this in any way but we also have another
theory that it could actually vary depending on some aspect of the
handshaking process that takes place when you connect the bottom line though
is that nothing was actually
zero latency with the closest device our avr receiver being almost zero latency
the good news though is that pretty much every combo was low enough that most
people wouldn't notice the difference and if you're the kind of person who's
sensitive to it well there's no reason that you have to hook your current game
console up to your vizio m7 series quantum 2020 tv through any other device
it's got two HDMI 2.1 inputs four total
more accurate color out of the box thanks to support for dolby vision HDR
gaming and their new on-board processor it boasts extremely low latency in game
mode as we've seen as long as you're hooked up to it directly and it's got
support for auto low latency mode and there's even more improvements to the
gaming experience coming through firmware updates so guys you can check
this puppy out along with the soundbar at the link below and they've got a
bunch of deals going on down there as well so don't wait
thanks again to vizio for sponsoring this video it's something that we've actually really wanted to explore for a
long time and i thought the results were fascinating even if they raise more
questions than they deliver answers and thanks to you guys for watching if
you're looking for another video to dive into i'd recommend our deeper
investigation into the ldap device which talks about how we can use it to
evaluate which displays are the absolute best for gaming