keyboard latency test
input latency would be 10+5=15ms. But be aware, when a keyboard has rubber-dome type of switches, and any laptop with scissor switches. When you press a key on the keyboard while using the keyboard tester website, a specific tab will be open to you where you will be required to press the key and check its functionality. One person even says. My plan was to look at the end-to-end pipeline and start at the beginning, ruling out keyboard latency as a real source of latency. This is because, as a human, you don't activate the switch, you press the key. The USB low speed spec states that the minimum time between packets is 10ms, or 100 Hz. During our testing we haven't had any connection drop or latency issues, so we can confidently say it's a reliable Keyboard and Mouse. of the key switches used and the debounce algorithm used. And also, Cherry MX Red switches will be faster than Brown. bounce time Before writing this up, I read what I could find about latency and it was hard to find non-specialist articles or comment sections that didn’t have at least one of the arguments listed below: The most common response to questions about latency is that input latency is basically zero, or so close to zero that it’s a rounding error. Numbers are rounded to the nearest 5 ms in order to avoid giving a false sense of precision. 8ms is typical for mice/Windows; notebook trackpad is usually around 10ms to 12ms. Power and ground were supplied by an arduino board. Most keyboards add enough latency to make the user experience noticeably worse, and keyboards that advertise speed aren’t necessarily faster. A common response to this is that "real" gamers will preload keys so that they don't have to pay the key travel cost, but if you go around with a high speed camera and look at how people actually use their keyboards, the fraction of keypresses that are significantly preloaded is basically zero even when you look at gamers. Ad copy that you’ll see includes: Despite all of these claims, I can only find one person who’s publicly benchmarked keyboard latency and they only tested two keyboards. There is not a single modern keyboard that has 50ms latency. Since that's the vast majority of the market, even if all "serious" gamers did this, that would stll be a round error. If you look at “gaming" keyboards, a lot of them sell for $100 or more on the promise that they’re fast. … The second type of latency is a mismatch between the timing of an audio recording and how it actually 'lands' on the multitrack in your digital audio workstation. While that’s technically possible, most devices are nowhere near being fast enough to be limited by USB polling latency. These are often coupled with a membrane computer board, which you should avoid at any cost if you’re into the least latency with the most reliability. The debounce time might limit the repeat rate of the key, but there’s no inherent reason that it has to affect the latency. On a USB device, Normal, non-hardcore-gaming users simply aren't going to do this. 2. In a future post, we'll look at the entire end-to-end pipeline to see other places latency has crept in and we'll also look at how some modern devices keep latency down. Latency / input lag Analysis. There weren’t two identical copies of any switch, so we bought a few switches so we could do calibration measurements with two identical switches. Simply press any key to test it. It all started because I had this feeling that some old computers feel much more responsive than modern machines. the state of its key matrix. Azure speed test tool. USB is the usb low speed protocol, which is the protocol most keyboards use. That's 20x the transistors running at 16x the clock speed -- keyboards are often more powerful than entire computers from the 70s and 80s! It is usually measured in milliseconds. However note that I am not a professional gamer. Typing Test - Test your typing speed and find out how many letters and words you can type per minute - Easy, online and completely free. Take these calculations with a grain of salt. If, for example, you're playing a game and you switch from moving forward to moving backwards when you see something happen, you have pay the cost of the key movement, which is different for different keyboards. The exact type of switch isn’t important here; any low-resistance switch would do. by Stefpiano from Keyboardwaves determines the shortest delay between a key press and a key release. Test every key on your computer keyboard from within your browser for free. Although desktop keyboards can be quickly and cheaply replaced, this is not the case for laptop computers where the keyboard is integrated into the computer itself. There are switches specifically made for faster key input, such as the Cherry MX speed switches. That’s better than a 100% chance, but it’s not clear to me why people think that you’d need a delay as long as the the clock period for the delay to matter. Apologies for not explaining terminology here, but I think that anyone making this objection should understand the explanation :-). Mac. USB FS stands for the usb full speed protocol, which allows up to 1000Hz polling, a feature commonly advertised by high-end keyboards. For example, an iMac G4 running macOS 9 or an Apple 2 both feel quicker than my 4.2 GHz Kaby Lake system. Sounds simple, but make no mistake, its impact on typing process is rather complex, because typing is an amazing feat of our body and nervous system (at least, from engineering standpoint). However, if the scan rate were 100Hz, then the maximal [see Keyboard Key Switch Mechanisms] [see Evolution of Laptop Keyboard] 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. To use this tool, try to press and release a key as quickly as possible. The two gaming keyboards we measured weren’t faster than non-gaming keyboards, and the fastest keyboard measured was a minimalist keyboard from Apple that’s marketed more on design than speed. The term latency refers to the period of time the computer needs to process an audio signal. It’s not a coincidence that the quickest keyboard measured also has the shortest key travel distance by a large margin. This doesn’t actually make sense because there are independent quantities. Why scan so quickly? Matt Wright, 2/11/4 through 3/8/4. ... We hope that Luu gets to test some of the PS/2 keyboards so that we can get a better picture of latencies across brands and interfaces. Note that, unlike the other measurement I was able to find online, this measurement was from the start of the keypress instead of the switch activation. gray line: mouse move message time offset from rAF time / vsync (best case: consistent sawtooth pattern). However, it’s common to see USB devices round this down to the nearest power of two and run at 8ms, or 125Hz. esc. I never trust feelings like this because there’s decades of research showing that users often have feelings that are the literal opposite of reality, so got a high-speed camera and started measuring actual keypress-to-screen-update latency as well as mouse-move-to-screen-update latency. A measurement that starts from switch activiation time misses this large component to latency. Another problem with this line of reasoning is that the full pipeline from keypress to screen update is quite long and if you say that it’s always fine to add 10ms here and 10ms there, you end up with a much larger amount of bloat through the entire pipeline, which is how we got where we are today, where can buy a system with the CPU that gives you the fastest single-threaded performance money can buy and get 6x the latency of a machine from the 70s. Test your network latency, download and upload speed to Azure datacenters around the world. This is a little unusual in that the commenter claims some kind of special authority and uses a lot of terminology, but it’s common to hear people claim that you can’t notice 50ms or 100ms of latency because human reaction time is 200ms. We are not in such a hurry, so we can just type what we need and examine the result later. We can see that, even with the limited set of keyboards tested, there can be as much as a 45ms difference in latency between keyboards. I don't actually trust this setup and I'd like to build a completely automated setup before testing more keyboards. This quote as well as other comments in the thread illustrate another common fallacy -- that input devices are limited by the speed of the USB polling. Established keyboard testing utility KeyboardTest has been used to test and check for faulty keyboards by PC enthusiasts and production line environments (in batch mode testing) since 2003. Here’s a “cognitive neuroscientist who studies visual perception and cognition" who refers to the fact that human reaction time is roughly 200ms, and then throws in a bunch more scientific mumbo jumbo to say that no one could really notice latencies below 100ms. An additional problem with debounce delay is that most keyboard manufacturers seem to have confounded scan rate and debounce delay. The scan rate of a keyboard measures how frequently the keyboard updates (internally) The poll rate together with the scan rate determines the maximum input latency. Not actually… poll rate refers to how often the OS will check the USB device for updates. Average latency measurements would also get better with such a setup (because it would be easier to run a large number of measurements). The Bluetooth Multi-Device Keyboard K480 is a keyboard for your computer, that also works with your tablet and smartphone. How I FINALLY won my MIDI latency war (Cubase 7 x64, BabyFace interface, Win7 pro x64) First, here's how I measured my real latency in milliseconds: Set up your system and DAW optimized as best you can. rate is 1000Hz, then the keyboard is polled every 1ms and so the maximal Even without going through contortions to optimize the switch mechanism, if you’re willing to put hysteresis into the system, there’s no reason that the keyboard can’t assume a keypress (or release) is happening the moment it sees an edge. Works with any keyboard and any browser. The keyboard tester online gives you a chance to check each and every button on your keyboard. Record, using another device like an iPhone, the sound of your finger hitting the keyboard followed by the sound of your virtual instrument. Keyboard Checker the best online keyboard tester. Thanks for Leah Hanson, Mark Feeney, Greg Kennedy, and Zach Allaun for comments/corrections/discussion on this post. Let’s start with the basics — why bother with latency at all? algorithm is used that waits 5ms for a switch signal to stabilize, then the scan rate This project was done with help from Wesley Aptekar-Cassels, Leah Hanson, and Kate Murphy. You might argue that this introduces a kind of imprecision, which might matter in some applications (music, rythym games), but that's limited by the switch mechanism. Up to 170 Million Searches Per Second; Under 0. The other half of the question is, does the latency added by a modern keyboard actually make a difference to users? 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. If you want to know the exact setup, a E-switch LL1105AF065Q switch was used. With 1ms polling, the average latency from USB polling is 0.5ms, giving us a 3.5ms delta. And if we're looking at the repeat rate, imagine we have a 5ms limit on the rate of change of the key state due to introducing hysteresis. If you want a visual demonstration of what latency looks like and you don’t have a super-fast old computer lying around, check out this MSR demo on touchscreen latency. Thanks to RC, Ahmad Jarara, Raph Levien, Peter Bhat Harkins, Brennan Chesley, Dan Bentley, Kate Murphy, Christian Ternus, Sophie Haskins, and Dan Puttick, for letting us use their keyboards for testing. Cutting open the cable damages the signal integrity and I found that, with a very long cable, some keyboards that weakly drive the data lines didn't drive them strongly enough to get a good signal with the cheap logic analyzer I used. Is 40ms of latency noticeable? Its debounce time is roughly 6ms, which corresponds to a frequency of 167 Hz. Although it is referring to an M-Audio device you can use this software with any MIDI keyboard or interface. For example, the debounce It turns out the machines that feel quick are actually quick, much quicker than my modern computer -- computers from the 70s and 80s commonly have keypress-to-screen-update latencies in the 30ms to 50ms range out of the box, whereas modern computers are often in the 100ms to 200ms range when you press a key in a terminal. The fast scan allows the keyboard controller to start the clock on the debounce time almost immediately (after at most 20 microseconds), as opposed a modern keyboard that scans at 167 Hz, which might not start the clock on debouncing for 6ms, or after 300x as much time. Keyboard Latency Test Use this command format to test the latency of connections from multiple points: PS C:\> test-connection -source Server14, Server 15, localhost -computername Server64 Use this command format when the ping response is expected to take longer than usual, either because of an extended number of hops or a high-traffic network condition:. MIDI DIN and MIDI USB have exactly the same latency. That means, thin keys, such as laptop keys, will be much faster than thick keys such Unicomp Keyboard. Simply press any key on your keyboard to test it - if it works it will turn green. Although we didn't discuss throughput in this, when I measure my typing speed, I find that I can type faster with the low-travel Apple keyboard than with any of the other keyboards. The USB measurement setup was a USB cable. The median jitter was < 1ms and the 90%-ile jitter was roughly 5ms. I’d really like to test more keyboards before making a strong claim, but from the preliminary tests here, it appears that gaming keyboards aren’t generally faster than non-gaming keyboards. After about 50ms of extra wait, I … Delay or latency when playing your MIDI keyboard in Sibelius Last Updated : August 19, 2013 Products Affected : Sibelius If there’s a delay between you playing your keyboard and you hearing the sound, this isn’t because there’s a problem in Sibelius but because your sound card or audio interface is taking too long to process the sound. The ‘gaming’ column indicates whether or not the keyboard is branded as a gaming keyboard. We also measure the latency over different connection types. key presses. So assuming a simple The connection column indicates the connection used. Since it only needs to detect two voltage levels, the circuitry is simpler and … It provides the most accurate results for mouse latency. Anyway, at the time I did these measurements, my 4.2 GHz kaby lake had the fastest single-threaded performance of any machine you could buy but had worse latency than a quick machine from the 70s (roughly 6x worse than an Apple 2), which seems a bit curious. Normally, the scan rate is limited by the Let's skip what that means, but if you're using a 60Hz keyboard, you just have 0-16ms random latency as a default which is really bad for a rhythm game. A logic analyzer is like an oscilloscope except it can only measure digital voltage levels. That's like saying latency on modern computers is fine because some people build gaming boxes that, when run with unusually well optimzed software, get 50ms response time. Note: It is possible to look up the poll rate of a USB device using software. The start-of-input was measured by pressing two keys at once -- one key on the keyboard and a button that was also connected to the logic analyzer. When videoing “normal" keypresses and typing, it takes 4-8 frames for a key to become fully depressed. Test is totally subjective to my gameplay. Modern computers have much better throughput, but their latency isn’t so great. If you are on a Mac then the SNOIZE MIDI Monitor software does a similar job and they have nice documentation on their site on how to use it. My Test from Peppy Keyboard Test is ~13 ms I still have time to test made to play with normal beatmap. But it turns out keyboard latency is significant! Most switches will start firing before the key is fully depressed, but the key travel time is still significant and can easily add 10ms of delay (or more, depending on the switch mechanism). However, it’s common to see USB devices round this down to the nearest power of two and run at 8ms, or 125Hz. Let’s look at the measured keypress-to-USB latency on some keyboards: The latency measurements are the time from when the key starts moving to the time when the USB packet associated with the key makes it out onto the USB bus. If you pull out the schematics for the Apple 2e, you can see that the scan rate is roughly 50 kHz. It's possible you'd see something different if you look at high-level competitive gamers, but even then, just for example, people who use a standard wasd or esdf layout will typically not preload a key when going from back to forward. If this doesn’t immedately strike you as absurd, consider that an Apple 2 has 3500 transistors running at 1MHz and an Atmel employee estimates that the core used in a number of high-end keyboards today has 80k transistors running at 16MHz. Fixing My Keyboard's Latency. A few seconds doesn’t make a difference, right? Keyboard Latency Test This creates multifold challenges in network. This is fundamentally the same fallacy as above. NeVMiku. I am used to play FPS on PC so I can recognise when there is some input lag. The situation with gaming keyboards reminds me a lot of talking to car salesmen: Salesman: this car is super safe! Moreover, increasing latency is not only noticeable to users, it causes users to execute simple tasks less accurately. Me: that’s nice, but how does it fare in crash tests? ScanRate = 1 / ShortestKeyHold. This is justified by statements like "there's no point in scanning faster because the debounce delay is 5ms", which combines two fallacies mentioned above. This line of argument is like saying that you wouldn’t notice a flight being delayed by an hour because the duration of the flight is six hours. Through the above test results for keying correctness, latency, and interfered working critical point shows that Microsoft’s Bluetooth keyboard still holds the better performance with wireless interference condition. blue line: inter-mouse message times (best case is flat line). With 8ms polling, the average latency added from having to wait until the next polling interval is 4ms. Test all keys on your keyboard with this easy-to-use website. There is a web page called – HTML/JavaScript Mouse Input Performance Tests. Note that whatever you select in the app, it's added to the actual latency of your own keyboard and computer–probably 100ms or so for most of us. As far as response times, all you need to do is increase the poll time on the USB stack. For this test I played some game with mouse and keyboard on the zero latency connection and adding latency on top using WinDivert. Due to the system latency on the computer, this isn't an absolute value, but a relative value that you can compare between mice we've tested. Salesman: 12 airbags! Moreover, a modern computer with one of the slower keyboards attached can’t possibly be as responsive as a quick machine from the 70s or 80s because the keyboard alone is slower than the entire response pipeline of some older computers. F1. Somehow wrong with me.I'll try to calibrate Universal Offset again. Tests were done by pressing the z key and then looking for byte 29 on the USB bus and then marking the end of the first packet containing the appropriate information. While discussing Dan Luu’s keyboard latency experiments I realized that I had never tested my keyboard’s latency. And for reference, the 45ms delta between the slowest and fastest keyboard measured here corresponds to 2.7 frames at 60fps. Gray horizontal lines are every 5ms. input latency is 1+5=6ms. The idea used here is that the scan rate of the keyboard effectively determines the shortest delay between a key press and a key release. Let’s take a look at some latency measurements for keyboards and then look at the empirical research on how much latency users notice. This is commonly done for other types of systems and AFAICT there’s no reason keyboards couldn’t do the same thing (and perhaps some do). Our test bed will be performing some CPU-limited testing today at 1080p, so we’re using a Core i9-10900K test rig for all benchmarking. If our poll For example, two of the top comments on this slashdot post asking about keyboard latency are that keyboards are so fast that keyboard speed doesn’t matter. Table 3: Measured Latency and Critical Point Results. This introduces some jitter as the two buttons won’t be pressed at exactly the same time. would be limited to 200Hz. It tests latency of key press to the time USB receives the signal, not from the start of key activation. As we’ve seen, some devices do have latencies in the 50ms range. We measure the click latency using an audio recording of when the mouse button is clicked and when the computer registers the input. And yet, the median keyboard today adds as much latency as the entire end-to-end pipeline as a fast machine from the 70s. Contrast this to the Apple "magic" keyboard measured, where the key travel is so short that it can’t be captured with a 240 fps camera, indicating that the key travel time is < 4ms. Also, the idea that it's fine that keys have a bunch of useless travel because you can pre-depress the key before really pressing the key is just absurd. It has 12 airbags! Gaming keyboards often claim to have features that reduce latency, like connecting over USB FS and using 1000Hz polling. I'll test the latency and compatibility with win 10 and cubase! How do I Perform a Mouse Latency Test? A major source of latency is key travel time. In fact, it’s a bit absurd to use an entire arduino to provide power, but this was done with spare parts that were lying around and this stuff just happened to be stuff that RC had in their lab, with the exception of the switches. Here we will look at two methods of measuring mouse latency. Previously, we've seen that terminals can add significant latency, up 100ms in mildly pessimistic conditions if you choose the "right" terminal. That gives us one full keypress cycle (press and release) every 10ms, or 100 keypresses per second per key, which is well beyond the capacity of any human. Neither of these delays are inherent -- keyboards use a matrix that has to be scanned instead of having a wire per-key because it saves a few bucks, and most keyboards scan the matrix at such a slow rate that it induces human noticable delays because that saves a few bucks, but a manufacturer willing to spend a bit more on manufacturing a keyboard could make the delay from that far below the threshold of human perception. Some people claim that key travel doesn't matter for typing speed because they use the minimum amount of travel necessary and that this therefore can't matter, but as with the above claims on keypresses, if you walk around with a high speed camera and observe what actually happens when people type, it's very hard to find someone who actually does this. , if the scan rate is limited by USB polling is 0.5ms giving. The result later rate is roughly 50 kHz latency from USB polling is 0.5ms, giving us 3.5ms. 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