Perfect delay-free gaming: delay on HD-TVs

Hello,

I've been on a quest to achieve a perfect delay-free gaming set-up and I was wondering about the experiences of others.

I've been trying to output from my computer to my HDTV on HDMI and have been having a strange and frustrating problem: input-delay. After much time spent tweaking my computer settings to get everything perfect, it's rather frustrating.

I've read all about this problem. Apparently HDTVs have delay when they are required to scale video feeds from "weird" resolutions to their native resolutions. The other common reason for lag is due to video processing (Motionflow on Sony TVs, etc).

Now, I've shut off all the Motionflow (my TV is a Sony) and processing stuff and made sure to put the TV in game mode and there's still a small delay. Here's the thing: When I'm on my Windows desktop there is no lag! There's no lag in the mouse movement, and if I play a game in a window, everything is perfect. However, when I put the game to full screen, lag appears! I am making sure that the emulator's full-screen mode is a native resolution of the TV too (1080p). If I play the game in full-screen mode (1920x1080) on an LCD monitor I have, there is no lag at all.

Furthermore, I have a PS3 (connected through HDMI as well), and I am certain that there is absolutely no lag with the system.

Does anyone have any idea what could be going on?? Why would the same 1080p resolution settings on my standard desktop and on the PS3 not cause any lag, and yet application in 1920x1080 full screen mode does? Are ther any other relevant settings I'm not thinking of? Driver stuff?

Has anyone else had this issue? How did you solve it?

Thanks!



Matt

Hello everyone,

First of all, thank you for the input! I have faced the reality that delay / input lag is a fact of life with HDTVs and will be satisfied to minize this as much as possible.

As such, my input-delay-on-TV problem has evolved into a new problem.

First, let me say I've actually mostly "fixed" the delay issue; in the emulator I was using, I had to turn off V-Sync. Vsync was worsening the delay (obvious oversight, I know).

There's definitely a threshold of delay for perceivability. I know that when using an HDTV there will always be some lag; it's a matter of reducing it so its below the threshold where its detectable. In my experience, I think that:
-the TV adds a little lag vs the laptop monitor, and
-the V-sync setting in the emulator adds a little lag vs no V-Sync

Both of these realities at once make the input lag cross the threshold and drive me nuts
Only one of these make the lag ---almost--- undetectable

Now, I majorly prefer playing emulators on the TV. It enhances the experience immensely and makes it feel a lot more authentic (as an emulator of NES games, which is what I'm playing).

So, currently, without V-Sync on and outputting the signal to the TV, the lag problem is gone.


...but, now there is a new issue

My latest concern is with image tearing (obviously, VSync was to fix the tearing).
Now, I'm guessing that everything I've said so far is common knowledge and actually completely expected for those in-the-know. here's where the curve-ball comes in (possibly due to my lack of understanding)

The emulator only tears in full screen mode... when I leave the emulator application as a window, there is absolutely no tearing and no delay; it's perfect. Absolutely perfect. It's just what i've spent hours trying to obtain through tweaking and configuring the TV, computer, etc etc.

So my main question is, why does this only tear when put in full screen mode??

The frustrating thing is that even though full screen mode doesn't stretch the image to the full screen
(the game screen is actually the same size as it is in the window, just with blackness covering everything else (instead of my desktop and icons in the background)), the problem will only happening in full-screen mode.

So, why the tearing suddenly? what is happening differently when the application is just in a window?
I can resize the window and the application scales itself. I can resize it so it takes up pretty much the whole desktop screen (actually more coverage than in fullscreen mode with the aspect ratio correct, since areas of the screen in full-screen mode are just black) -- No tearing.
I've even tried running the emulator in full screen mode but with a smaller resolution (640x480). It incurs lag (of course.. HDTV scaling issue, I assume), but it ALSO tears, so I didn't think it had anything to do with the burden on the system of filling a whole screen with data instead of just a window

Does anyone have any idea?

This is starting to get off-topic, but if possible, I'd even accept some weird application that would cut the window panel out of the emulator and display everything behind it as pure darkness since that would accomplish the same task (delay-free, tear-free emulation). In other words, I'm satisfied with the windowed resolution, as long as I can't see anything else on the screen.

Any help appeciated greatly.

Thanks!

--Matt