Could potentially reduce Street Fighter 5's input lag from 6.2 frames of latency to 4.22

It's no secret that many modern fighters these days suffer from more input lag than what players are comfortable with. In the case of Street Fighter 5, the amount of input lag averages at about 6.2 frames.

One of the reasons for this is because a lot of today's fighting games are using Unreal Engine 4. Essentially, excellent graphics at the cost of input latency.

Street Fighter 5 isn't the only game in this genre that uses Unreal Engine though. Games like Tekken 7, Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, and the upcoming Dragon Ball FighterZ do as well.

For the longest time, it looked as though this was something we would just learn to deal with. This is pretty much what we as fighting game players have done thus far.

Now, however, it looks as though a solution has finally been presented. The developers of this engine have updated it to address this problem.

Would it even be significant enough though?

It's been noted that this update will reduce latency by about 66ms on a 30Hz game. Games like Street Fighter 5, however, are 60Hz games.

As a result of this, "the reduction will be around half" in a fighter like Street Fighter 5. It isn't really indicated whether it will be a little less than half or a little more, so we'll just use 33ms for the sake of math.

Street Fighter 5 is a game that runs at 60 frames per second. This means that a single frame is about 0.0166666 seconds.

"In other words, if this update could be applied to Street Fighter 5 then the input lag would be reduced by roughly 1.98 frames... Street Fighter 5 would go from having 6.2 frames of delay to 4.22."

In other words, if this update could be applied to Street Fighter 5 then the input lag would be reduced by roughly 1.98 frames. This would be quite the improvement.

Street Fighter 5 would go from having 6.2 frames of delay to 4.22. This is rather significant considering that Ultra Street Fighter 4 had about 4.5 frames of input lag.

Tekken 7 is known for having one of the largest amount of input lag for a fighter. If this update could work for Tekken 7, it would reduce the lag from 7.7 frames to about 5.72 frames.

These changes will be shipped into Unreal Engine in the 4.18 and 4.19 update later into this month. Given, there may be some limitation I'm unaware of but theoretically this should have a huge impact on the player experience for various fighting games.

It's also very possible that we'll see no change at all due to technical limitations or even developer preference.

Unreal Engine information source: Unreal Engine website.

Sent in by WAZAAAAA, KnyghtFall, and an anonymous user.