Finally, your monitor needs to display the new game frame on-screen, and it can only do this when the display ‘refreshes’.Īll of these things happen between you pressing ‘shoot’ and your in-game character visibly shooting on-screen.Īny one of these steps can cause high input lag.Your GPU then needs to store the information in a render queue, render the new game frame, and send it to the display for output.Your CPU must then process this input and instruct the graphics card to render a certain game state based on this new information, which means transmitting the instruction via the motherboard to the graphics card.First, your peripherals must process your input and send this data to your motherboard and then to your CPU.It occurs because there’s a whole chain of things that must happen between your mouse click and your character shooting their weapon. Input lag, also known as ‘system latency’, refers to the time between your peripheral inputs and the corresponding game actions being outputted on-screen.įor instance, if you press your mouse button to make your in-game character shoot their weapon, input lag would be the time taken between the mouse press and your character visibly shooting on-screen.Įveryone has some level of input lag, it’s just that hopefully the latency is so low that it’s imperceptible. But it’s possible to fix input lag and doing so doesn’t always have to cost an arm and a leg. Perhaps even more frustratingly, there are several things that can cause input lag, making it hard to diagnose.

When you’re lining up the perfect headshot only to miss because the game registers your mouse click a second too late, input lag can mean the difference between winning and losing a match. While input lag might not bother you if you’re sitting a few feet from your screen with a gamepad in hand, if you’re playing first person shooters with a mouse and keyboard, it can become a pain very quickly. There are many things that can ruin a gaming experience-low framerates, high network latency, a squeaky chair-but perhaps one of the most common (and most annoying) problems is input lag.

Monitor input delay