this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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PC Master Race
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I really wish other PC guys would stop being like
It really seems like some people only get enjoyment from the idea of having the best possible version of something and being elitist about it. Rather than just enjoying their thing that plays games for what it is.
If you play any games where timing matters, 10ms can be the difference between doing the thing and not doing the thing.
Rhythm games are a perfect example. The tightest timing window is often 1frame at 60fps, which is 16ms. If you are reacting to a headphone with 10ms latency then you'll be missing over half of the timing window. If you also have a wireless keyboard with 10ms then you will react 10ms late, your input will be received another 10ms late and you will miss the entire window and have to adjust your timing to be a full frame early.
Fighting games also commonly use this 1frame window. It's even worse when we are talking about mouse lag interrupting your hand-eye feedback loop on camera movement. I just tried to play the new Myst on an underpowered laptop with too much frame time with vsync enabled and that was enough to make me unable to navigate a curvy corridor, until I disabled vsync.
Latency is a real problem. To put it in the words of John Carmack
The other issue is that you start compounding latency. If you're playing online with a 50ms ping, that hear > react > input registered cycle is suddenly 70ms instead of the 10ms you were expecting. Every single instance of latency you're adding to the system is taking you another step away from reacting in time.
But my point is 99.99% of people aren't competitive fighting game players that need to react to a 1 frame window and will be noticeably disadvanged by a 1/100th of a second delay. And any competitive fighting game player will be using a fight stick anyway.
Same with rhythm games. Yes, top level rhythm gamers might have a point with this but 99.999% of gamers are not top level rhythm gamers.
In a rhythm game the difference between a 10ms ping (wired average for just audio) and a 100-300ms ping (Bluetooth average for just audio) is definitely noticeable, at any level of play. With Bluetooth it isn't even just 1 frame you'll miss, it's about a 3rd of a second in the worst case.
This isn't necessarily a fair comparison because USB receiver headsets latency much closer to wired exist, but most people with wireless headsets will be using Bluetooth, and not aptX LL Bluetooth.
I don't even play rhythm games, casually playing the music-synced rooms in Celeste (a 2D platformer) was enough to make me stop playing until I could find a wire for my Sony XM5's.
The latency is unbearable when playing on a midi keyboard. Gaming is not the only thing out there.
This wasn't meant to be the point of the meme at all. Wireless keyboards and mice have overcome the issues that made them objectively worse than their wired counterparts (latency and accuracy). Unfortunately though with wireless headphones you either get low latency or good audio quality, and I'm yet to find headphones that do both well. At the moment I have WH-1000XM4s I use for music at work and ATH-M50Xs I use for games. If I could get the best of both worlds I absolutely would, but it seems like every good sounding wireless headphones have awful latency that's too jarring to ignore when playing games.
Arctic Pro Wireless headset might be expensive but they use proprietary WiFi signal from their receiver to the headphones that makes response time so fast, the latency is a non issue and almost equivalent to a cable connection.
You're very passionate about headphones.