Input Lag: Where the Milliseconds Actually Go

Total input latency is the time between you clicking and the screen showing the result. It’s the sum of a chain, and the chain has a few large links and a lot of tiny ones.

People spend hours on the tiny ones.

The chain

Stage	Typical	Can you fix it?
Mouse sensor + polling	1–2ms	Marginally
USB transfer	~1ms	No
OS input processing	1–3ms	Slightly
Game engine tick	5–15ms	Via frame rate
Render queue	5–30ms	Yes, significantly
GPU render	varies	Via settings
Display transport	1–3ms	No
Panel response + scan-out	3–20ms	Yes, via refresh rate

The two large, controllable links are the render queue and the display. Everything else is noise by comparison.

Fix one: frame rate above refresh rate

This is the biggest lever and the most misunderstood.

Running at 240fps on a 144Hz monitor doesn’t show you 240 frames. It does mean that when the monitor draws a frame, that frame is fresher — it was rendered milliseconds ago rather than tens of milliseconds ago.

That’s why capping at exactly your refresh rate feels worse than running uncapped, even though you “can’t see the difference”.

Target roughly double your refresh rate where you can. The frame latency calculator shows the frame times involved.

Fix two: turn off V-Sync

V-Sync eliminates tearing by making the GPU wait for the display. That waiting is pure added latency, frequently 20ms or more.

Use adaptive sync (FreeSync / G-Sync) instead. It solves tearing without the latency penalty, which is the entire reason it exists.

If you must use V-Sync, cap your frame rate 2–3 fps below your refresh rate — that keeps the queue from filling and cuts most of the penalty.

Fix three: reduce the render queue

Modern GPUs queue frames ahead. More queued frames means smoother pacing and worse latency.

• NVIDIA Reflex — where a game supports it, turn it on. Genuine, measurable reduction, no downside.
• AMD Anti-Lag — the equivalent.
• “Low latency mode” in the driver, if the game has no built-in option.

Reflex is the single best free latency improvement available. Enable it in every game that offers it.

Fix four: raise your refresh rate

A 60Hz panel adds up to 16.7ms just waiting for the next refresh window, plus scan-out time. 144Hz cuts that to under 7ms, 240Hz to about 4ms.

This is why 60Hz to 144Hz feels so dramatic — you’re removing 10ms from the chain and getting smoother motion at the same time.

What barely matters

Polling rate above 1000Hz. The difference between 1000Hz and 8000Hz is fractions of a millisecond, and very high polling rates can increase CPU load enough to cost you frames — which costs more latency than it saves.

Wired versus wireless mice. Modern wireless gaming mice are within a millisecond of wired. This argument is over.

Exotic USB port selection. Use a port directly on the motherboard rather than a hub. That’s the whole optimisation.

Most “gaming mode” driver tweaks. Placebo, largely.

Display settings that hide latency

Turn off anything that processes the image:

• Motion smoothing / interpolation
• Dynamic contrast
• Most “picture enhancement” modes
• Overscan

Look for a “Game Mode” on the monitor itself — it bypasses this processing. On a TV, this is essential rather than optional; TVs add enormous processing latency without it.

In-game settings that help

• Lower settings → higher frame rate → lower latency. The relationship is direct.
• Fullscreen exclusive rather than borderless windowed, where the game offers it. Borderless goes through the desktop compositor and adds a frame.
• Disable in-game frame smoothing or motion blur.

Measuring it

Without special hardware you can’t measure the full chain, but you can compare relative changes:

• NVIDIA’s in-driver latency metrics, where supported
• The high-speed camera on a phone, filming the mouse and screen together at 240fps
• Simple A/B feel testing — unreliable, but the changes above are large enough to notice

The honest hierarchy

If you do exactly three things:

1. Enable Reflex or Anti-Lag
2. Turn off V-Sync, use adaptive sync
3. Get your frame rate comfortably above your refresh rate

That’s the overwhelming majority of the available improvement. Everything else on the internet’s latency checklist is rounding error.

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Bottom line: the render queue and the display are the big links. Reflex on, V-Sync off, frames well above refresh, and a high-refresh panel. Polling rate and cable choice are not your problem.