Latency measurements?
Answered
Hi,
I am interested in using the keyboard for dual programming/ gaming. What is the latency of the keyboard (which matters a lot for gaming). Does anyone have data?
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Hello Joshua,
Our keyboards feature 1000Hz polling rate over USB, however latency with keyboards isn't so easily defined as some latency must be introduced to prevent errors (debouncing). From my experience keyboard response is near the bottom in terms of a potential bottleneck over other more useful and helpful changes you can make to your whole system (say a different switch type, higher refresh monitor, more precise mouse, and of course - practice). If you want to A/B test it our keyboards can run off PS/2 (with a firmware flash) which is interrupt, and you can see if you can tell the difference between polling and interrupt.
I suggest going down the rabbit hole of keyboard latency; https://danluu.com/keyboard-latency/ this is the best info I have found on the subject and if you look at their conclusions, they state what I personally have come to the conclusion of as well: "Most keyboards add enough latency to make the user experience noticeably worse, and keyboards that advertise speed aren’t necessarily faster. The two gaming keyboards we measured weren’t faster than non-gaming keyboards"
"A major source of latency is key travel time. It’s not a coincidence that the quickest keyboard measured also has the shortest key travel distance by a large margin. "
They also go on to say: "I don't actually trust this setup and I'd like to build a completely automated setup before testing more keyboards. While the measurements are in line with the one other keyboard measurement I could find online, this setup has an inherent imprecision that's probably in the 1ms to 10ms range. While averaging across multiple measurements reduces that imprecision, since the measurements are done by a human, it's not guaranteed and perhaps not even likely that the errors are independent and will average out."
I would propose that unless you're at pro level gaming or using keyboards for some sort of lab tests in relation to latency that it would be hard to tell the difference, and if you are the type that could theoretically then it's more of a trial and error to find the board that appears the fastest to you.
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