Player, Benchmark Thyself

By Nelson Schneider - 09/14/14 at 01:11 PM CT

The “Glorious” PC Gaming Master race loves their benchmarks. Sometimes, I think this particular variety of games enthusiast is actually more enthusiastic about fiddling with hardware, spending ridiculous amounts of money on pointless upgrades, and, yes, running benchmarking software than they actually are about playing games.

Interestingly, way back in 2007, shortly after the start of the 7th Generation, the Human Benchmark project began, aiming to gather information about the dreaded input lag and display lag that gamers love to blame for their own inadequacies. Now, over 10 million tests later, the Human Benchmark project’s website has recently undergone its third revision and has plenty of tasty, tasty stats available for lag haters to agonize over. What the project has discovered in its years of testing is that human beings, in general, have a reaction time of around 250 milliseconds (my own initial results were 264 ms).

Thus, in the grand scheme of things, min/maxing and spending large sums of money in an attempt to remove all latency and therefore gain an advantage in competitive multi-player environments is fruitless and futile. Even the best (top 100) human (supposedly) times recorded by the Human Benchmark project range between 100 and 200 ms. Worrying about a monitor, input device, or the difference between wired and wireless connections is utterly meaningless when the organic component in the equation will never come close to matching the mechanical ones.

Comments

Nick - wrote on 09/17/14 at 10:23 PM CT

256ms for me

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