Mesa 23.3 Lands Optional Support For Allowing Game Tearing On Wayland

[Rovano]

If you want superior response times, play on a TN monitor.

I play CS Go on an old IPS monitor and we are still able to compete with young players. But yes. I'm looking forward to the newer monitor. :-) One thing is being forgotten here. There are several types of vsync.

[Weasel]

I've always found the touted latency jump from vsync to be over-rated, I mean personally I'll notice it...for about half an hour after which my brain has subconsciously started compensating for it and I don't notice it any more because like most humans brains, my brains are hard-wired to automatically compensate or tune out most things our senses pick up that are consistently there. This is the same mental wiring that ensures most humans can tune out the noise of a fan that's been on for long enough, can look directly at something located in an area they're familiar with yet fail to see it, more often than not stop directly feeling the clothing/glasses and the like on their bodies all day unless made aware of it or struggle to feel/hear their own heartbeat unless they're trying or it's beating differently to normal/not at all among many other examples.

Heck, if I've got a PC that's capable of playing whatever fast-paced game at or near the monitors refresh rate then I'll straight up play better with vsync on than off if there's still a big enough difference between my average and minimum framerates when it's unlocked because of this fact. (ie. My brain can start to compensate for extremely low latency during the low-action periods where the CPU/GPU aren't doing much, but when the action picks back up and latency increases again my brain then has to recompensate before I'm playing at 100%...)

Reaction times are dependent on many factors. But adding delay to the image on screen does not help. This is measurable with high speed cameras.

It's not about noticing 20ms or not, it's about adding it up. They all add up.

[oiaohm]

Reaction times are dependent on many factors. But adding delay to the image on screen does not help. This is measurable with high speed cameras.

It's not about noticing 20ms or not, it's about adding it up. They all add up.

Weasel you are still ignoring the human brain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_vertigo

There are different flicker caused problems that can come about from screen tearing. Like Flicker vertigo your fine motor control over the mouse can be gone.

This is the problem the delay on image on screen can be less than the effect the tearing/flicking is causing to a person human brain.

The reality is some people with vsync on/tear free can aim mouse faster to target on screen than when they have vsync off/tearing on all due to having minor flicker vertigo that takes away their motor control to drive the mouse. This is also nicely intermittent on the person when the broken frames are not happening all the time.

Weasel its one of those catches just because you can see the image sooner does not equal that your motor control section of your brain will be in any state to respond to it.

Yes flicker vertigo problem for some players is highly frustrating because they can see the target but then cannot do anything about it and without proper diagnostics normally don't put 2 and 2 together. Some notice they are better with vsync on but they don't work out its vertigo .

Weasel basically the requirements is player + computer. The way the players brain is wired is a factor if tearing is advantage or not.

Weasel if you don't have one of the flicker triggered conditions screen tearing is advantage. If you have one of the flicker triggered conditions screen tearing is a mega disadvantage. Yes the Flicker_vertigo you are not talking 20 ms crippled response you are talking up to 500ms crippled response or more.

This is the catch the brain triggered issues from flicker make the latency caused by being tear free being absolutely nothing. There are professional first person players who have Flicker_vertigo triggered by tearing we are talking players in the top 100 in the world in their games.

[Weasel]

Weasel you are still ignoring the human brain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_vertigo

There are different flicker caused problems that can come about from screen tearing. Like Flicker vertigo your fine motor control over the mouse can be gone.

This is the problem the delay on image on screen can be less than the effect the tearing/flicking is causing to a person human brain.

The reality is some people with vsync on/tear free can aim mouse faster to target on screen than when they have vsync off/tearing on all due to having minor flicker vertigo that takes away their motor control to drive the mouse. This is also nicely intermittent on the person when the broken frames are not happening all the time.

Weasel its one of those catches just because you can see the image sooner does not equal that your motor control section of your brain will be in any state to respond to it.

Yes flicker vertigo problem for some players is highly frustrating because they can see the target but then cannot do anything about it and without proper diagnostics normally don't put 2 and 2 together. Some notice they are better with vsync on but they don't work out its vertigo .

Weasel basically the requirements is player + computer. The way the players brain is wired is a factor if tearing is advantage or not.

Weasel if you don't have one of the flicker triggered conditions screen tearing is advantage. If you have one of the flicker triggered conditions screen tearing is a mega disadvantage. Yes the Flicker_vertigo you are not talking 20 ms crippled response you are talking up to 500ms crippled response or more.

This is the catch the brain triggered issues from flicker make the latency caused by being tear free being absolutely nothing. There are professional first person players who have Flicker_vertigo triggered by tearing we are talking players in the top 100 in the world in their games.

I was talking about latency. You will be impacted by it, no matter if you can react to 20ms or not, because it adds up to an already high reaction time from you.

Now, if you get sick from flickering that's a completely separate topic. It still decreases latency, lol. You just get sick while watching it, so probably not worth the tradeoff.

[mdedetrich]

The problem with looking at it like that is that "better quality" is subjective. To one person it means perfect frames and to another person it's faster frames. While most people will want perfect frames that look nice, faster frames can be good for things like testing, benchmarking, competitive gaming, and lower input latency.

Tearing and unplayable also depends on your hardware and in-game settings. If you're able to get greater than 60 FPS, you can turn off vsync and enable tearing to get lower input latency. If you're unable to get a steady 60 FPS, like it dips down to 45-50 in that one part of the level but the rest of the time it's normally fine, sometimes you don't want to be hit with 33ms of lag when sub-60 v sync occurs, because that is noticeable, turning on tearing is an alternative to latency/FPS jumping between 33ms/30FPS and 16ms/60FPS.

This is the way.

If you can push/handle a lot of frames then having tearing is fine because you will almost never notice it due to how many frames you will be exposed to and with the tearing comes lower input lag (which for gaming based on reaction times is always good).

Otherwise if you can't really hit 60 fps then creating perfect frames may make sense because then you can really notice the tearing.

[oiaohm]

I was talking about latency. You will be impacted by it, no matter if you can react to 20ms or not, because it adds up to an already high reaction time from you.

This is still wrong.
There are two areas of brain that can add latency when it comes to game play in big way. Human vision processing and Human motor control. Its simple really seeing something 20ms faster as a human does not help if the flicker results in either of those sections adds back like 40ms. Yes nothing strange for fickler triggered issues in the human brain to be adding 500ms of human reaction latency.

You said already high reaction time. What if a person has a low reaction time without flicker but then a high reaction time due to flicker. Real human exist with this problem.

Human reaction time is not a constant. Depending on your own brain and training alters what human reaction is. Yes flicker is one of the things that can make human reaction massive worse. The idea that 20ms extra screen latency is always worse is based on the false idea that human reaction time is constant and what you doing to remove that 20ms screen latency is not doing something that under mines human reaction time.

Now, if you get sick from flickering that's a completely separate topic. It still decreases latency, lol. You just get sick while watching it, so probably not worth the tradeoff.

I am not talking about noticeable sick and you wrong flicker is not a separate topic. I am talking about where flicker in fact under mines human reaction time as in increasing the human latency itself. Person can be felling perfectly fine and have their reaction time being mess up by 500ms intermittently. It is possible and does happen for particular humans 20ms savings of allowing tearing is totally undermined by how much effect the flicker is having on their response times.

[oiaohm]

If you can push/handle a lot of frames then having tearing is fine because you will almost never notice it due to how many frames you will be exposed to and with the tearing comes lower input lag (which for gaming based on reaction times is always good).

This is presume. Issue is what the vision sections of your brain are effected by does not mean your conscious mind notices. There is a reason why some pro game teams do flicker tests to work out if a person human reaction time is being undermined by flicker.

Flicker is one of those things that can change human reaction time to be worse. This is what leads to the problem. Same issues start happening with frame generation and other things like it as well.

[mdedetrich]

This is presume. Issue is what the vision sections of your brain are effected by does not mean your conscious mind notices. There is a reason why some pro game teams do flicker tests to work out if a person human reaction time is being undermined by flicker.

Flicker is one of those things that can change human reaction time to be worse. This is what leads to the problem. Same issues start happening with frame generation and other things like it as well.

I'm sorry this is wrong, they have done tests with professional CS:Go players and the ones with higher FPS/refresh rate monitors consistently consistently got better results. There are diminishing returns but you start hitting those at 240hz+/200+ FPS.

You (or your brain) might subjectively not see a difference but when it comes reaction times in reality there most certainly is a difference.

[oiaohm]

I'm sorry this is wrong, they have done tests with professional CS:Go players and the ones with higher FPS/refresh rate monitors consistently consistently got better results. There are diminishing returns but you start hitting those at 240hz+/200+ FPS.

There have been multi different studies with CS:Go players. There are tools with CS:GO to measure reaction time. Yes increased monitor HZ to 240hz for majority does increase performance. But there are some of the top 100 CS:Go players in different studies that turned out that tearing causes their human response time to get worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2PwyBTbCcQ

The range of CS:Go player reaction time is massive. This shows in this test ~150ms difference between bottom and top. But the top 100 is wider than that.

You (or your brain) might subjectively not see a difference but when it comes reaction times in reality there most certainly is a difference.

This is the problem you don't subjectively notice if your human reflex time has been undermined. Some players of CS:Go in the top 100 have improved their over all reaction time by removing tearing.

Lets say you set you computer with all the recommendations to get the lowest latency possible that generates tearing is possible that your reaction times are totally garbage then you go set all the setting for the lowest latency possible without tearing and you have reaction times in the range of the top 100 players CS:Go. Remember if you are effected by one of the human problems you can be adding +500ms to your reflex time when there is tearing displayed.

increasing monitor Hz has been show as good. Increasing FPS at the effect of having lots of tearing have been shown to be good for the majority of players but have been also have been shown bad for the minority of players.

mdedetrich testing for tearing effected or not is a little harder. For a tear to happen a render has to be half done at a vsync. You might be getting like hundreds of frames without any tearing in a configuration that allows tearing.

https://evatech.com.au/news/studies-show-gamers-have-better-k-d-ratio-with-higher-fps/

Smaller tearing effects help remove distracting effects, helping players maintain focused on winning the game.

Interesting point when you get into the deeper studies. They noted that higher the hz the smaller the tears become due to less time between frames. But tearing is having adverse effects on players what this one puts under focus.

There is improvement in players using G-sync/Adaptive sync/VRR over having screen tearing.

The reality like it or not studies have found that not better always to have tearing even as a professional gamer. Yes as a pro gamer you may be investing in VRR monitors so you don't have tearing ever.

Wish I could find the other study that went in on different CS:GO players why they were losing focus due to tearing. Yes the results was all kinds of things from there motor sections of brain messing up to vision section of brain messing up. When you are talking big competitions for money some of the CS:GO teams run serous medical checks on this stuff. Losing a big prize money game because a player saw tearing that adversely effected them is kind of a stupid mistake since tearing is known to do some people a number and you can test for the problem and invest money in hardware not to have the problem.

[mdedetrich]

oiaohm I don't know why you are still arguing with me, its basically a fact that higher FPS/refresh rate leads to better performance in games and people do care about that in games.

You seem to be bringing up that people are "subjective" to dismiss this while also arguing for the sakes of arguing. Stop it.