Kadano.net // SSBM input lag // Audio input lag measurements


This page is only for presenting my measurements and the testing method I used to acquire them. If you are wondering why audio lag is important, please refer to the main page linked above.

Here is a video in which I show my testing method I used for acquiring the measurements presented in the table below: https://twitter.com/Kadano/status/858795797957226497
To put it short, I measure the button input signal on the controller against the console's or PC's analog video and audio outputs. This is done with a 4-channel digital storage oscilloscope (Rigol DS1054Z). Unless noted otherwise, the controller is connected to console directly (native control) and to PCs using the official Nintendo 4-port adapter.

I decided to include video lag in all test series as well, since having audio and video synced as closely to console as possible is important. You can find all my samples used for the table below in this Google sheet, with some additional notes.
Commenting is enabled in that link, so if you have any questions that others might be interested in as well, please ask them as a comment there. Alternatively, if the question you are asking is better suited to asking me privately, please send me an email to kadanossbm (located on Google's mail server).
I've also posted about this in the Dolphin emulator forums, hopefully people there have good ideas of how to decrease the audio input lag.

My thoughts on the audio delay

So far, I've tested four different PCs for audio input lag, and all four of them have had very similar amounts of lag (when using the fastest Windows audio backend XAudio2 at 0 buffer). The big important next step is finding out where the >100ms of audio delay originate. Possible candidates are:
1. Dolphin itself (I can test for this by testing the input lag of other applications)
2. Windows' audio systems (I'm hoping there is some kind of hidden buffer that's set very high by default to prevent audio crackling issues)
3. The XAudio backend (by testing other programs' input lag that support ASIO, I should be able to test for that)
4. Sound card drivers
5. The sound cards themselves

If you have knowledge on this subject and suggestions on what to test for / which changes to make in order to decrease lag, please let me know (ideally in a comment on the Google sheet)!


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