Topic: Input Lag / Motion Delay

Now that I have a Wii U, I've noticed that it suffers from some rather significant input lag and motion delay. It's not a problem for turn-based games, and for some other games it's not as much of a problem, but it really affects my performance in a lot of games. Sure, I can play directly on the GamePad to negate the problem, but I don't want to be stuck playing most of my games on such a tiny screen. I can also transfer the save data from many of my Wii retail games back to my Wii to play them there, but that doesn't help with my digital games nor any games that previously used an online connection. Is there any way to fix the problem, like a way to hook up a controller directly to the Wii U (and plays more than just one game), a way to hook the Wii U up to an old CRT set (which is where I play my Retro Duo and my Wii)? Is it possible to perform a reverse transfer of my Wii's digital games back to my Wii, which would at least solve the problem for those games?

Once you transfer to a newer system, you cannot transfer back to an older one. This is the case with Wii to Wii U and Nintendo 3DS to New Nintendo 3DS.

The reason for the latency on the television is due to the extra processing required of modern TVs to display such large images. Unfortunately with cheaper TVs, you may notice more latency than higher end ones. Some modern TVs may have visual settings/filters (or Picture Modes), such as "Standard", "Dynamic" and there is usually one for "Gaming" which will reduce the amount of processing required and therefore help reduce latency, but at the expense of more vibrant colours.

I've had problems with latency too (particularly with the New Super Mario Bros. games), however, changing the picture settings to "Gaming" helped dramatically. I still opted to play some of the more difficult levels on the Gamepad though.

It is impossible to transfer from Wii U back to Wii. (Legitimately anyway - backing up wad files is possible).

I tried Wii U on a CRT once and it still has the 1 frame delay added by the Gamepad. It can be done just by using the same output as the Wii has (RGB (PAL) / Component / S-video (NTSC) / Composite).

Don't think there is a good solution (I have a plasma that I am no longer using that falls just into the acceptable range at about 30ms until the lag from the Gamepad is added it is great.)

So I switched to a 8ms 27" gaming monitor which sidesteps the problem but doesn't look anywhere near as nice. (With 2 HDMI's designed for these type of applications). Cannot have bigger without getting a higher resolution or going to digital signage monitors which I believe have some of their own problems.

Be so much easier if the Gamepad wasn't activated until it was turned on (Even if it was a setting somewhere).

Just switch your TV to gaming or PC mode.and switch off all artifical filters / or picture enhancers.

What kind of television do you have? Some brands just have high input lag reguardless.

I am hooking up my system this morning. Kinda wish I hadn't read this first. Now if there is something there I will be looking for it even if I don't want to. lol

One thing that I know adds to input lag is things the TV's do to images. Personally as a gamer I turn off any secondary processing done by my TV's, they add very little but take away so much, especially when it comes to a gamers mindset.
My TV also has a gaming mode where it turns all this off for me, so the HDMI is like a straight shot to what you see on screen instead of the TV manipulating anything.
I am hoping when I hook mine up that I will not notice any lag significant enough to bother me. I will report back later today on that. Though after reading this I am not so optimistic.

Can't say I've ever noticed any display/input lag on my Wii U...

But I use a 22" LCD TV made in 2009, maybe this is only a problem for new TV's?

You can't transfer your digital games back to Wii from Wii U, and input lag depends on your HDTV. You might be able to decrease the lag by using settings on your HDTV(like "game mode" or something similar), or your HDTV may just be slow, regardless.

If you want to play Wii U on a CRT TV, you can use the Wii AV or component cables.

No. It's mostly reliant on what HDTV you have. If anything, newer HDTVs are most likely to have less lag, because they HAVE improved them over the years. My 2012 39" Insignia LCD display has 8ms of lag, and that's still on the low end of input lag. The 2014 Insignia LCD/LED model has 6.5ms of input lag with slightly better image quality, and that basically wasn't even around in 2009 as far as HDTVs go, from what I can recall.

There would be less of a chance that its running processes on your images prior it to be displayed to your screen the further you go back in regards to a TV's age. A 22 inch from 2009 is probably something that does not. The size alone from that time would almost eliminate the possibility that it does anything to the image.

Higher priced and higher quality TV's are usually the ones with more stuff on them. There are varying degrees of success with these things. One companies digital noise filter is not always as good as another. Fortunately, the better ones now have modes that allow you to turn all that stuff off now. Though some TV's still have pesky stuff even in their gaming modes. There are places on the web to find all this info out when searching for a new TV FYI.

Input lag and response time are two different animals.
Input lag - The time it takes someting to happen on screen when you push a button. So if you hit a jump button the time it takes the character to jump on screen would be the lag time for your input.

Response time - The time it takes the pixels on your screen to switch colors. So an image that moves across your screen goes from point a to point b in the span of say 1 second. With a low response time your seeing where the image stopped whilst still seeing the trail it took to get there because the individual pixels are all still getting to the new color of what was behind the moving image.

LOL, tried to make that simple. Might of convoluted it instead.

Yeah, newer panels are better and there is a game mode. In some older panels the latency could often jump up into the 100s of ms, it's nowhere near as bad now. Just make sure you have your TV set to game mode. Also there's a tiny, tiny bit more input lag in most LCD TVs because most TVs are IPS rather than TN. Which is just as well, but that's another story.

Also with OLED on the verge of being commonplace? It won't be long before we're basically bag to panels being more-or-less just as fast as they were back in the CRT days. You can literally go out and get a 55" OLED TV for about as much as decent 55" LCD TVs were five years ago. That's insane.

What we really need is a tv equivalent to gsync / freesync. (Obviously supported by the consoles).

Input lag can be a problem on some tvs, for gaming at least, its never mentioned in the specs so its difficult to choose a good tv for gaming. Best you can do is set the tv in game or pc mode if it has one and turn off all settings which might add to processing time such as dynamic contrast etc.

I use a pc monitor with my Wii U and there is no perceivable lag. However if you plan on using a Wii U with a pc monitor make sure its a model which can display limited rgb (16-235) signals correctly as that is the only colour range that the Wii U can output currently.

On an unrelated note, turning the sharpness of the tv/monitor down can make a big difference in reducing jaggies, especially 720p games like Mario Kart 8. I have read a lot of people complaining about jaggies in Mario Kart and I think this is partly down to the sharpness being set too high.

4K TVs are even about as expensive as a 50" 1080p LCD was, 2 and a half years ago, WITH all the 4K and smart TV bells and whistles. The only thing you're really missing out on is 3D and OLED, but we were already missing out on that with the regular LCD screens, anyway. I didn't really look at the input lag, but 50" 4K TVs are basically the same price as the 47" HDTV my mom bought, and it has truckloads of more features with 4K and smart TV stuff.

It's always getting better and cheaper, because it has to in order for more people to care about buying the new stuff.

If OLED is better in terms of gameplay it is far more interesting than 4k.

Is there any that are less than 16ms under all circumstances ? (Probably not presuming whoever runs www.displaylag.com knows what they are doing).

Strangely, my TV's game mode isn't designed to reduce latency. It doesn't touch the filters and actually bumped the picture quality setting up from 50 to 75 from standard mode (although it did reduce the contrast a little).

Anyway, I've manually adjusted the settings and turned off the filters and sharpness to get rid of a lot of the latency, although it's still not perfect. Oh well, I guess I'll just play most of my VC and WiiWare games (which don't need HD anyway) on the GamePad and use the CRT for motion-heavy Wii games like "Wii Sports Resort" or "TLoZ: Skyward Sword."

Yeah, I've been waiting for a new monitor that could replace what I have now at a reasonable price for a while. I'd much, much rather OLED than 4K. That said, if there was an OLED monitor on the market which had freesync/gsync? I'd happily spend $1000 on it. Even if it was 23" and 1080p.

I have to wonder if this is like a videophile thing, you know like "vinyl sounds better than CDs?" I have a 2007 Philips 42" plasma and it displays all resolutions over component and HDMI - a godsend with the mish-mosh of resolutions in the PAL VC - and I've been reading complaints about input lag for years and have never felt any issues playing with wired or wireless controllers. Now I grant that I'd never consider an LCD TV just because of the inherent limitations of the tech requiring all that additional,processing to overcome, but could my old set (the cheapest plasma I could find at the time) really be that good, or is this something like the above or people who complain about "PAL speed up" where it's a minority of people who actually notice/are affected by it?

Not a dig at anyone, I'm just interested to hear someone explain what this is since I'm clearly not seeing it.

@Sean_Aaron
Like most things it's a bit of both. Earlier LCDs had quite a bit of latency and over time they've improved it to the point where they're about as fast as Plasma panels. CRTs were basically instant however. In the grand scheme of things though because there HAS to be some latency given that it takes time to render a frame which in itself is variable? At this point unless you're using something like a VR headset it shouldn't be that much of a big deal.

But when people complain about it it's usually because their particular set is either fairly old, poorly designed or they've set it up wrong. When you don't have it set to "game" mode for example the set is probably doing some additional processing which takes even more time. However sometimes it's just the placebo effect.

It occurs to me that my TV has no processing that happens - it has a lot more picture settings than my partner's newer Samsung plasma for example and I'm happier with the picture, but there's no canned settings like game modes or whatever so a calibration DVD is a must. I expect my next set will be an OLED one - I really hope it won't be an issue getting interlaced resolutions to display using component leads on my next TV because I feel like I lucked out here!

I am happy to report my LG Plasma shows no signs of input lag whatsoever. When I hit the jump button on Mario, he instantaneously jumps, and I am a bit of a snob when it comes to this stuff. So I am happy.