Latency as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
1,033 words · ~5 min read
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these days we become used to instant gratification whether it's ordering at a
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drive-thru looking up incredibly important information on the connected
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computer in your pocket or gaming with someone on the other side of the planet
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we expect lots of things to happen
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instantaneously but as much as our technology has advanced we're still
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fighting the dreaded problem of latency
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and no I'm not talking about your repressed Freud and desires what I mean
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by latency is the gap in time between some kind of input like a key press or
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turning your head in a VR headset and the system spitting out the appropriate
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response and this latency affects the way that you use tons of things in the
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real world but why don't electricity and
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radio waves travel super fast well yes
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they do in fact radio waves travel at the speed of light while electricity
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traveling through wire can go up to nearly the speed of light but the issue
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isn't with how quickly a signal goes from A to B instead latency is caused by
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processing times and since any kind of
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input to a computer has to be processed
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everything has at least some amount of
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latency this can be very noticeable in
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situations where a slow hard drive causes doing something simple like
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finding a picture on your computer to be agon singly slow or when a web page is
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designed poorly and you can't click on anything for a few seconds while it
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finishes rendering you've also probably
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noticed latency if
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uh well if you've ever watched an interview via satellite on a news
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channel where the subject takes a few seconds to start responding to the
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reporters questions often these kinds of
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latency won't completely screw up what you're trying to do I mean waiting an
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extra 15 seconds to look at that TPS report probably won't ruin your day but
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latency can be an absolute killer in
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other situations if you enjoy playing games online high Network latencies
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caused by processing at each point in the network can cause weird laggy
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behavior that can result in catastrophic in-game mishaps or even getting kicked
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off The Game Server completely you can
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learn more about latency in games up here and believe it or not the
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consequence of high latency can be even worse than getting fragged in csgo with
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car manufacturers increasingly installing backup cameras and some cars
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even completely ditching mirrors in favor of cameras such as this BMW I8 we
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were checking out last year and I'm wearing a lavalier microphone on me that
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will give you guys an exact idea of how how much delay there is between
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something happening and what's on the screen low
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latency is a must so that drivers can
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react to hazards in time even half a second delay could lead to a tragic
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accident so how do you cut down on latency other than just having a faster
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computer well in Computing context a common tactic is to use wires where
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possible instead of going Wireless a good example of this is how current VR
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headsets like the Rift and the HTC Vive
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rely on wired connections to a PC
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although these wires are cumbersome wireless tech typically has greater
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latency due to more complicated processing which could mean disorienting
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or nauseating display lag when you're in a virtual world this is sometimes called
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motion to Photon latency and if you're gaming online and you have a choice of
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servers pick the one geographically closest to you although electrical
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signals travel insanely quickly latency
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of a few hundred milliseconds can still be an issue when you're connecting to a
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farway server and that's enough to wreck your gaming experience in most cases
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there's also software and even special network adapters that push through data
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packets from your game before others so
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they won't be stuck waiting around for
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other application on your
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system some routers can even be configured to push packets to your
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system first to reduce latency if a few people on your network are rudely
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deciding that now is the time that they have to watch that episode on Netflix
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now of course you're never going to get rid of latency completely I mean there's
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even eye to brain latency since your brain needs time to make sense of
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whatever the heck you're looking at the goal is to get it down to an acceptable
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level that won't leave you frustrated or with a lawsuit on your hands because
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your backup camera didn't show you that little old lady in time we've teamed up
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with Audible and they're offering everyone watching this video a chance to
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Audi books which are great to listen to when you're stuck in traffic on the
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train running errands playing games that you don't need to listen to the audio to
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or whatever else you happen to be doing I've personally been listening to the
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princess diarist by Carrie fiser a
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behindth scenes recollection of her experiences filming Star Wars Episodes 4
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from Princess Leia herself and audible is offering a free Audi book with your
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trial to you so you can listen to it too just go to audible.com tequ sign up
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download a free title maybe that one and start listening it's that easy all right
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guys like it if you liked it disliked if you disliked it check out our other channel Channel Super Fun or even lonus
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