Performance & Latency

Your reaction time is vital in any competitive game.

1 millisecond can be the difference between dodging a bullet and taking a hit. So we take latency and response times extremely seriously, along side having an ultra-low CPU and memory footprint.

This is why we created a testing tool specifically for Double Movement applications and keyboard to controller remappers, which we geeked over and tweeted about, way back in May of this year 2021.

Keys2XInput vs Wooting

Keys2XInput has 0.06 to 0.2 milliseconds response times in our testing on varying setups. For comparison 0.1 millisecond is 10,000hz (10x faster than your average gaming mouse or keyboard).

Wooting’s result: 15.6 milliseconds! That’s close to 64hz! .. Even mice made in the 1990s were twice as fast as that. We are as shocked as you.

V1 vs V2 or LowLevel vs RawInput

We have been asked many, many times what application has less input delay or what settings perform better.

For Keys2Xinput vs Wooting, as you have read above that is an easy one.
But for V1 vs V2 this is more difficult to explain, due to the different techniques being used.
(beside the fact that V2 has been optimized a lot compared to V1!)

V1 has a keyboard-capture technique called LowLevel.
V2 has 2 keyboard-capture techniques called LowLevel and RawInput.

These 2 keyboard-capture techniques are very, VERY different from each other,

  • LowLevel acts as a ‘Filter’ on the keyboard
  • RawInput acts as an ‘Event’ on the keyboard

This means that LowLevel is ‘blocking’ and RawInput is ‘non-blocking’.
These 2 images show a simplified representation for each technique:

As you can see LowLevel has a shorter path to travel than RawInput, and thus shows a lower latency when measuring this.
But what the measurement tool does NOT show, is the ‘blocking’ behavior for LowLevel.

LowLevel will halt the keyboard input-queue until the key is processed by Keys2XInput, because a LowLevel ‘Filter’ must inform Windows if this key shall be blocked or not.
This means that every non-movement key(wall/ramp/edit/…) also has to go through this ‘Filter’, which will add a small amount of latency to each of them!

RawInput on the other hand, will not block the keyboard input-queue and is only being notified of a keyboard-event.
This means that RawInput cannot block keys, and thus will not add any extra latency to non-movement keys.

Conclusion:
Due to the above mentioned drawbacks for the LowLevel method, we advise players to use RawInput!
RawInput is the default keyboard-capture method in V2.

note: We have planned to create a tool that can measure the amount of latency added for non-movement keys by LowLevel.
(although this is not on our priority list, because we believe RawInput is the overall better competitive choice)




Xbox vs Playstation

When we created our measurement tool in early 2021, we were seeing an advantage for Xbox.
And thus advised players to use X360 (Xbox) over DS4 (Playstation).

But a couple months after we released our tool publicly, a Microsoft update improved the numbers for Playstation.
Right now(11-24-2021), the numbers are very close.

It looks like X360 still has the better latency, but DS4 now has the better frequency.
The differences are shown in the next images:

Conclusion:
We leave it up you to pick your preferred emulation type!

Note: We do not know how efficient Fortnite internally is with Xbox vs Playstation, we only measured the time it takes for Windows.
Additional: X360 offers a higher resolution than DS4. (meaning X360 has more finesse when adjusting your angle in small amounts)


Keys2Xinput vs Analog Keyboards

The fastest analog keyboard on the market is a 1000hz with an advertised 1 ms latency.
Where the claims of 1ms latency have been contested by all the pro players that used such a keyboard.
(more on this in a bit)

From the latency measurement tool you can see that Keys2XInput has a minuscule latency and can operate well over 15000hz.
Outperforming not only analog keyboards but also any other keyboard on the market!

This automatically leads to the conclusion that the fastest double-movement possible is:

  • Keys2XInput in combination with a proven low-latency, high-frequency keyboard.

We probably had to start with: what is an analog keyboard?
If you go to https://www.usb.org and try to find information on analog keyboards, you will discover that analog keyboards do NOT exist!

But they are called analog keyboards… How does it work?
These keyboards are composite devices, containing:

  • a digital keyboard
  • an X360 compatible controller
    • using the same technique as Azeron and our own top-secret USB device
  • custom interfaces to interact with the composite device
    • used by custom software like the manufacturer’s configuration utility

The X360 compatible controller is what Fortnite sees, and that is what gives you double-movement.

1) The first problem we have here is, that the advertised latency and frequency could be for any part of the composite device.
There is NO clear information available about the latency and frequency for any of these composite devices.

2-n) All the other (ripshit) problems that come to mind are not relative to this discussion