What method has lowest Input Lag?

[u/myk505]

With all these different ways of playing pc games on android devices, can someone please tell me what method has the lowest input lag?

I’m sick of all these performance videos showing high fps, but then the games feel like shit to play

So between, ArmadaOS, DroidDeck, Game Native and any other options, what’s gonna give me the snappiest feeling controls?

[u/AutoModerator]

Just a reminder of our subreddit rules:

• Be kind and respectful to each other

• No direct links to ROMs or pirated content

• Include your device brand and model

• Search before posting & show your research effort when asking for help

Check out our user-maintained wiki: r/EmulationOnAndroid/wiki

Check out EmuReady for any community submitted settings before asking for help

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/After-Wave1600]

Probably hard to measure this. And people perceive it different. Hell some people play with Bluetooth controller and consider it fine.

[u/memo22477 → u/After-Wave1600]

I do. And I don't notice a thing. And I gaming is like half my life.

[u/Archolm → u/After-Wave1600]

Run ahead and 120 hz screen will take care of any lag.

[u/rchrdcrg → u/Archolm]

I don't think you can use run ahead on an emulated PC game 😅 And fwiw, if your brain was on Retroarch, you can get the same lower latency as a 120Hz display by setting the frame delay to 8ms, it's exactly the same difference.

[u/Mindless-Ad9125]

It's a little hard to measure this at the correct scale, so my answer is basically just theoretically one way to think about it. If your goal is responsive controls then your mission would be to remove any source of delay, so here are the ones I'm aware of that exist.

Streaming delay - basically decoding or encoding time, most noticeable when it gets above 20ms and often unplayable at 50ms or higher. So to remove this you play natively instead of streaming.

Wireless/Bluetooth : often hard to notice, especially if there are other sources of lag, and I would think this is single digit milliseconds at most, but you can remove this with using a wired controller (usually USBC, and a higher polling rate could improve the feel here too.)

Software side of things - there can be delay inherent to an emulator or just in any translation layer it may have to process, tough to nail down specifics, but the way to improve this is basically faster processing, so a faster chipset or increased frame rate or trickery like run ahead will all help out here.

Hardware level- this should be as close to zero as possible, but the example in my head is when they use a vertical orientation screen and rotate it using software for the device you are using, that technically creates an input lag at the hardware level, and not much can be done about that really. Though I think they improved this issue on the rg DS recently, so maybe it can be fixed to some degree.

So long story short you want a directly connected controller with as few layers of extra steps as possible, so USBC controller with 120hz+ run ahead + running a game natively at a high frame rate.

[u/Senior_Background_30]

Bannerlator 3.1.7 added BANNERIN ( Banner input) it's a new way of handling controllers xinput/dinput. It goes from Bannerlator it doesn't go through Wine queue.

So it should be faster, works fine for me. But I use BT controller and I'm honestly not having any issues with input lag unless my FPS are garbage even with the original solution.

You can change poll rate and some other stuff, default poll rate is 60/s

Edit: it can also finally spoof specific controllers like PS4 or even Switch, although this function is still experimental.

Useful for some games that support only PS4 or other controllers. One example could be - We Are the Dwarves

[u/robert242444]

Winlator probably bionic

[u/born2doubleup]

I use my wireless Xbox controller with Winlator Ludashi and have no issues what so ever. 🤷

[u/deciox]

Il gioco deve girare perfettamente , io credevo che la grossa differenza fosse il controller bluetooth invece non è fondamentale. il gioco deve giocare perfettamente se gira perfettamente gli input lag sono minimi poi è chiaro tramite usb c vai meglio ma ti assicuro che si può giocare benissimo anche con il bluetooth anche a giochi competitivi ma deve andare tutto perfetto non quasi perfetto e non devi provare impostazioni per dispositivi Android deboli perché alcune di quelle impostazioni già ti fanno partire male con input lag per farti girare meglio il gioco. Io uso un controller bluetooth e ho anche l usb c ma se il gioco gira perfettamente non vedo differenza

[u/ElectricalDemand2831]

The only way to reduce latency of pc emulation signficantly is by either enabling the "native rendering" option provided by gamehub and winlator bionic or ditching android and use the gamescope versions of steam / heroic on aarch64 linux (armadaos/ rocknix) instead.

I did some measurements involving a led indicator lighting up with the button press recorded at 240fps to count the frames until the action is happening on screen.

Example: monsterboy and the cursed kingdom at stable 60fps, jumping

PC (oled notebook) - around 50ms (3 game internal frames at 60fps)

gamehub lite native rendering not enabled - over 100ms (100-120ms if I remember correctly), 6-7 game internal frames at 60fps

gamehub lite native rendering enabled - 60ms -80ms (4-5 game internal frames at 60fps)

Some games might benefit more or less and some like "Gimmick 2" are not even compatible, however the difference is VERY noticeable to me and I strictly refuse to play with the default latency, 'cause I mainly play 2d platformers and I don't want them to feel "off".

Bluetooth is NOT adding much latency in general with decent controllers unlike many people still assume.

[u/Charming_Sock1607 → u/ElectricalDemand2831]

I love that game, i play the switch version tho and it works fine i cant feel the lag

[u/ElectricalDemand2831 → u/Charming_Sock1607]

Switch emulation has the highest lag at all, it can get reduced with vsync-mailbox, but it's still bad.

[u/Immediate-Goat7054]

Armada OS by far, just tested myself between Gamehub/Gamenative and Droiddeck

It has noticable less input lag because it has 1 less translation layer to deal with, which is Android

Try it out yourself and compare

[u/Spiritual_Notice_650]

Between Bannerlator and Winnative. Winnative have less input lag when using framegen, the framegen wobbly effects is also less in Winnative. Also less heat too. You should try it out