Input Lag Estimator

### Is Your Latency Killing Your Performance? Input lag (or system latency) is the invisible enemy of every competitive gamer. It is the delay between your physical action (pressing a mouse button) and the visual reaction on your screen (gun firing). Even if you have 300 FPS, high input lag can make your game feel "sluggish," "heavy," or "floaty," causing you to lose duels you should have won.

Our Input Lag Estimator breaks down the complex pipeline of your PC—from your USB port to your eyeball—to give you a theoretical minimum latency estimate. While it cannot replace a high-speed camera test, it allows you to see how much delay each component of your setup is adding.

### The 4 Stages of Input Lag 1. **Peripheral Lag (USB)**: The time it takes your mouse to send data to the CPU. A 1000Hz mouse takes 1ms. A 125Hz mouse takes 8ms. 2. **Game Engine (CPU/Sim)**: The time your CPU spends processing game logic (physics, netcode). This scales with your IPC and game optimization. 3. **Render Queue (GPU)**: The time the frame waits in buffer before being drawn. If your GPU is maxed out (99% usage), this queue increases drastically (this is why NVIDIA Reflex exists). 4. **Display Lag (Monitor)**: The time it takes pixels to change color (Response Time) + the time wait for the next refresh cycle (Refresh Rate). A 60Hz monitor waits up to 16.6ms. A 240Hz monitor waits only 4.1ms.

### How to Use This Tool 1. **Enter Specifications**: Input your Mouse Polling Rate, Monitor Refresh Rate, and Average In-Game FPS. 2. **Select Technologies**: Toggle V-Sync (Vertical Sync), G-Sync/FreeSync, and Low Latency modes (like NVIDIA Reflex). 3. **Calculate**: The tool sums up the probabilistic delays to give you a "Total System Latency" range.

### How to Lower Your Input Lag * **Turn Off V-Sync**: This is the most important step. V-Sync can add 20-50ms of delay. * **Enable NVIDIA Reflex / AMD Anti-Lag**: These technologies reduce the Render Queue to nearly zero. * **Fullscreen Mode**: Always play in "Exclusive Fullscreen" (not Borderless Windowed) to bypass the Windows Desktop Window Manager (DWM) buffer. * **Cap Your FPS**: If you don't use Reflex, cap your FPS slightly below your GPU's max potential to prevent the render queue from filling up.

### Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) **Q: What is a "good" input lag?** A: < 20ms is excellent (Esports standard). 20-40ms is good. > 60ms feels noticeably sluggish.

**Q: Does wireless add lag?** A: Modern pro-grade wireless mice (Logitech Lightspeed, Razer HyperSpeed) have effectively the same latency as wired mice. Cheap Bluetooth mice, however, add massive delay.