Round 1, Lag!

Went to vivo on saturday after going to school, to cheer Jm on his Round1 SF IV match, but was rather disappointed at the setup. Held at the samsung flagship store in Vivo, it was held in a rather miserable corner of the store, with 2 sets hooked up to 2, what looked like 50", LED TVs.
The sitting was quite terrible as the table to put the sticks was at knee level, and the players bend over rather uncomfortably. There was hardly any standing place to view the matches (although i did get to see JM fight). The commentator couldnt focus on 2 matches ongoing at the same time, and thus 1 is always left out. There were plently of tvs around, not to mention a 100 or so inch TV wall beside it that was not used to broadcast the matches. Can hardly see the 2 tv with everyone crowding around, and no one is listening to the commentator's advice to ask the front rows to sit down. Terrible event planning, this one, esp since it costs every contestant $5 to sign up.

Me and pei found JM solo there, and when enquired abt why he came alone, he said he "asked his gf not to come" cos "will distract him". I can picture him saying "hey woman, u stay at home and leave the manly fighting business to me, now go iron some clothes!" Give that man a tiger!

Now we waited till abt 3 to see JM take his stab at the tournament. In the first rounds of elimination, probably to speed things up, everyone only had 1 shot, lose the match and its loser's bracket. As they had a rule that no character changes was allowed, JM went with his standard Chun Li, and faced off against honda.
Not seeing his best performance though, and he missed focus dash a few times, doing empty focus attacks that got punished, and lost the first round rather quickly. 2nd round was quite even and he had a life advantage half way tru, but came to abt equal at the end. He got a lucky cr.lk->ex lightning legs in the corner, and then.... totally flunked the ultra and did a jump Hk instead. And then it was over. JM is out. He didnt even want to stick around for the loser's bracket match.

He later mentioned that he was probably not used to the stick, and that the game "was lagging badly", but since i have an xbox myself, thats really not the case. (ie the game doesnt lag even if output at 1080P) In fact, what was lagging was the 50" TV. Despite being in "game mode" (i saw them configure), it was still lagging. Recent forum posts abt that tournament mentioned that many of the players missed combos and executions due to this few frames of lag. This is in fact, a very common problem on >30" LCD tvs, and that is why the major tournaments let the contestants view their matches on monitors with very fast response time(2-5ms) like this, and then duplicating that image onto big screen tvs. (this is one area that CRT pwns LCD, much higher refresh rates)

Here is an article devoted to how to find and fix "input lag" on HDtv,
which shoryuken.com actually started discussing it first here

In short, the lag here is due to those tv having post processing on each frame to "beautify" them slightly. "Game mode" in these large screen tvs are meant to turn off/reduce post processing to alleviate the lag but apparently in this case, it was not totally lag free. While a few frames will not hamper movies, rpgs games, etc, it is quite crucial for frame based games, like SF IV, guitar heroes/rock band etc since it reduces ur reaction time by 0.01666 sec(or 17 millisecond) per frame(if the game runs at 60 fps, and double that for a 30fps game). Average human has abt 200ms of reaction time when being very focus, and up to 120ms for those near super humans. so losing a few frames is like making ur reaction time slower by 30-50%!

Test ur reaction time here
Mine is ard 199 on average of 5 tries (late at night i might add), and the average for the site is ard 215, and the fastest is ard 100.

And also, the weird playing height might mess up some people's execution as well, esp those used to arcade position. In any case, everyone is also subjected to the same "flaws" and this makes the matches abit more prone to luck as well.

So in closing, JM, dun despair ok, better luck next time!
(i might add that JM was so unhappy over the match that after we had some food, he went directly to bugis to beat up some hapless kids, lol)

Addon:
Round1.sg has posted HD videos of the top8 match in youtube here
The last few matchs are particularly intense, like this:


Also, its seems that spectators have commented that after the initial wave of complains abt lag, the top brackets players seems to have gotten used to it enough, to do those long strings of 10+ hit combos, probably since they have to fight tru a long string of other contestants...