One of the big talking points surrounding Tekken 7 is the game’s increased amount of input delay; early testing of the game on PlayStation 4 (prior to the 1.03 patch) had shown that it had over 120 milliseconds — about 7 to 8 frames of delay.
Now, both Michael Murray and Katsuhiro Harada from Bandai Namco Entertainment have made statements about this. Specifically, the statements were in response to an article on Tekken Gamer that had cited an 8 frame buffer as the cause of the delay. For those not familiar with the issue, some in the community have blamed the input delay on the supposed presence of an 8 frame input buffer — something Murray refutes.
Harada continues on with this, stating that such assumptions are wrong. He also states that Unreal Engine 4 “eat[sic] 3-4 frames” and that they don’t need such a buffer. In addition to this, he also called into question the testing methods that people have used to test the game’s delay.
That last statement in his tweet has caused a fair bit of controversy. Input lag guru Nigel “Noodalls” Woodall, the man who did the early testing on Tekken 7‘s delay has brought Harada’s last statement into question, pointing out how his testing methods have been praised, and how developers have asked him to test their game for input delay.
Others, such as Hit Box community manager John Grimm have pointed out that, if the issue is something with Unreal Engine 4, it still doesn’t explain why Tekken 7 has more delay than other fighting games (such as Street Fighter V, and the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite) that are built on the same engine.
With all this in mind, it seems that the input delay controversy surrounding Tekken 7 isn’t going to die down anytime soon. That said, Bandai Namco is addressing the issue, and the latest round of testing has shown that the delay on PlayStation 4 has dropped to 114 milliseconds as of the 1.03 patch.
Sources: Michael Murray (Twitter), Katsuhito Harada (Twitter), Nigel Woodall (Twitter), John Grimm (Twitter)
