British subscription broadcaster Sky’s innovative Glass TV has many impressive and unique features, but there was always one area where it literally fell off the pace. It’s a game. Despite the incredible rise in popularity of console and PC gaming over the past decade or so, Glass launched without a dedicated game picture mode, making it difficult for gamers to use the most expensive and smallest video in today’s TV world. I’m being held back by one of the input lag times.
But almost three years after it first launched Glass TV, Sky has revealed that it has finally found a solution to the game lag problem, increasing the time it takes for the TV to render a game’s graphics to 70. They claim that it can be reduced by as much as a percentage. Given that we measured input lag time of 65.4ms for the current Sky Glass firmware build, a little math suggests that future firmware improvements could bring the lag down to less than 20ms. will be done.
Ocean blue version of Sky Glass.
Of course, an improvement of over 45 milliseconds in game response time for Glass is no mean feat when you consider how time is measured in everyday life. However, in a gaming context, 45 milliseconds is an eternity. After all, if you’re gaming on a Glass TV and competing against other players using gaming monitors or TVs where input lag typically drops into the single digits, Glass’s response time is 45mm. Saving seconds can literally mean the difference between in-game life and in-game life. If you’re playing a game that has some kind of response time aspect, you’ll die. Of course, many people do.
I’ve tried gaming with Glass myself, and the most severe and frustrating limitations of current lag levels occur in first-person shooters and platform games.in call of duty My typical kill-to-death ratio has absolutely increased significantly when gaming on Glass compared to gaming on a modern Samsung TV, which has less than 10ms of lag in game modes.trying to run around call of duty The map felt like running through molasses, and when I was trying to navigate a particularly sharp corner, I would sometimes suddenly die at the hands of a shotgun-wielding enemy who didn’t yet appear on the glass screen. . shot me down. Even though the replay showed them running through the door in front of me.Also, the number of failures rayman legend‘s Pixel Perfect Jump was nearly unplayable because what I was seeing on Glass wasn’t a timely enough representation of my position in the actual game.
Assuming that future improvements actually reduce Glass’ latency to less than 20ms, suddenly your competitive advantage will depend more on your own abilities than on your TV’s abilities. That’s exactly right.
We asked Sky how they were able to deliver this much-needed gaming enhancement on Glass TV without resorting to new hardware, and the answer was that Sky engineers have improved the efficiency of implementing HDMI within the TV. I found a way to do it. Firmware architecture. We were confident that this approach meant that using the Glass TV with the new game modes would not result in the same degradation in picture quality that some game modes cause on other TVs.
HDMI latency reduction is purely software-based, so gamers who own Glass can simply wait for the new Entertainment OS 1.3 upgrade to start rolling out in the future to experience an improved gaming experience. is. Glass TVs were introduced via the Internet in May.
Input lag reduction comes along with another key modern gaming feature. That’s support for Automatic Low Latency Mode (ALLM) switching, which is part of the HDMI 2.1 specification. This allows the TV to automatically determine whether the connected console is being used as a video source or to play a game, and turn low-latency gaming mode on or off accordingly. So we hope that he won’t even have to forget to manually enable the new fast response mode every time he switches from watching mountains of TV channels on Sky to annihilating enemies in COD.
It must be emphasized that the lag reduction and ALLM features coming soon to Sky Glass TVs will not solve all the gaming limitations of Sky Glass. Due to the limitations of the TV’s HDMI bandwidth and his 60Hz panel, it is unlikely that he will support 4K graphics at the variable refresh rate or the 120Hz refresh rate that both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 currently support. there is no.
However, input lag issues were the biggest obstacle to achieving enjoyable gaming performance with Sky Glass TV.
Incredible metal quality, a variety of color options, a built-in multi-speaker Dolby Atmos sound system, a fully streaming approach to content delivery, use of Sky’s unique and sophisticated menu system, and an incredibly small size. Thanks to the combination of features available for purchase, paid in monthly installments as part of Sky’s monthly subscription, the 55-inch Sky Glass was already the UK’s best-selling TV in 2023. However, this new game feature improvement will make Glass even more viable as a living room mainstay solution for even more users. The percentage of potential buyers who want to use their TVs for more than just watching TV.
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