Delays and disruption: Latency’s role in virtual reality gaming

For gamers, hardly anything is more frustrating than lag, also known as latency – delay between a user’s action and the game’s reaction. Besides causing ‘judder’ – the visually jarring, jerky motion of frame rate and refresh rate mismatch – suboptimal latency can impact gameplay continuity, reduce immersion and even cause virtual reality sickness.

With VR gaming on the rise, players and developers alike are pushing for as-low-as-possible latency. Hardware, software and signal strength all influence whether, and to what degree, a game lags – and how pleasant it is to play it.

Keeping latency low

Best kept to a minimum, latency has various impacts on virtual reality gameplay – some more obvious than others. Ideally, there is no delay between a player’s input and the resulting image. But if there is, this can have a confusing effect on the brain.

VR sickness refers to the nausea and dizziness that often occur when wearing a headset, caused by receiving disjointed sensory information from the eyes and inner ear. While not everyone experiences this (it’s reported that one quarter of headset wearers do), the feeling can be disorienting enough to discourage engagement with VR.

High latency only worsens this problem, creating a clear disconnect between what players perceive and what their bodies and brains expect. By increasing display resolution and adding blur, developers can cut down on queasiness – even if they can’t control latency.

Latency also determines whether a game can be played as intended. Long delays can introduce errors in the user experience. For example, if a player moves to pick up an object and that movement isn’t registered. This can be a minor or major problem, depending on what’s at stake; that object might be key to winning the game, and latency just lost it.

Finally, low latency ensures immersion. It’s like watching a movie that won’t stop buffering. Delays and disruptions take players out of the moment, leading to a less enjoyable experience overall.

Factors influencing latency

High or low latency doesn’t just happen; it’s influenced by a user’s connection strength, as well as the software and hardware at their disposal. Latency can thus be broken down into network latency, display latency and input lag.

Network latency, commonly referred to as ‘ping’, is the time it takes for data to travel from the game console to the server and back. It’s impacted by all things internet – the service provider’s connection quality, geographical distance from the server’s location and Ethernet versus Wi-Fi. For instance, the further a player is from the server, the higher the latency. And if someone else is on the same network, that congestion can also slow data transmission. In general, wired, fibre-optic connections are more reliable than wireless or satellite – but as a player, network speed is often out of your control.

Besides network connection, a user’s gaming set-up contributes to delays; separated into display latency and input lag. Display latency is the delay between when a signal is sent (by the gaming console) and received (by the monitor or TV). While many gaming-specific monitors are designed to lower latency, and certain TVs offer ‘game mode’, this isn’t the case for all displays.

Input lag, on the other hand, relates to the gaming device being used. In this case, it’s a virtual reality headset, often paired with a handheld controller. The delay is between the user’s input action and the game’s reaction, largely influenced by whether the device is wired. Many VR headsets, such as the Meta Quest 3 and Apple Vision Pro, are not.

Finally, a console’s hardware makes all the difference. If the system processor is slow, the game follows suit, regardless of signal strength or network connection.

Optimising gameplay

A myriad of factors influence latency in virtual reality gameplay. These can be obvious and external – maintaining a stable, high-speed internet connection or using wired devices designed for gaming – but are often baked into the headsets themselves. Today’s developers are largely focused on optimising built-in capabilities, introducing features like predictive algorithms, asynchronous timewarp and eye tracking.

Predictive algorithms are especially crucial in multiplayer VR games. By anticipating a user’s next move, this technology encourages smooth interactions and a seamless experience. Thanks in large part to developments in machine learning models, the best predictive algorithms can account for latency by noting a player’s last-known velocity and position.

Similarly, asynchronous timewarp (ATW) generates filler frames when a gaming console can’t maintain its frame rate. Developed primarily to reduce judder, ATW isn’t a perfect fix. Rather than addressing the root cause of the delay, it’s more of a band-aid solution, good for inserting the occasional missing frame. It’s still recommended that VR experiences aim for a sustained frame rate of 90Hz or higher.

Newer, more powerful headsets (or ‘spatial computers’), like the Apple Vision Pro, include eye and hand tracking. This eliminates the need for – and possible delays from – physical controllers. Eye tracking is also an especially useful feature, with applications in video display and rendering. This advanced tech reduces VR sickness too, as an added benefit.

Our eyes move in six different ways, and VR eye tracking records all of them. Rather than rendering the entire image in real time, eye tracking-enabled headsets only render the area the player’s eyes are pointed at, preserving computational power and (hopefully) lowering latency.

While certain innovations, such as colour pass-through, can introduce latency issues, developers seem set on counteracting these delays and disruptions through various means, giving VR gamers the best possible player experience.

Watch our FEED Forum webinar: Lessons in latency.