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By now, it’s no secret that Street Fighter V was plagued by numerous issues in the weeks after its launch. Some, like matchmaking, continue to be improved by the developers, but others could still use some work.

In a recent video, Battle(non)sense takes a break from the world of first-person shooters to explore input and network lag in modern fighters. His research focused on Street Fighter V, Ultra Street Fighter IV, Mortal Kombat X, and Skullgirls, using a sophisticated setup to determine input delay in both offline and online environments.

As you can see, his findings are pretty shocking. Despite being the newest game on the market, Street Fighter V’s input lag is considerably higher than both the previous franchise installment and its direct competitors. On average, Street Fighter V features more than double the delay of Ultra Street Fighter IV, and more than four times that of Mortal Kombat X and Skullgirls, both of which perform admirably.

The culprit is V-Sync, a tool that adjusts framerate to match a monitor’s refresh rate. While this typically has the benefit of cutting down on things like screen tearing and other graphic distortions, it can have a disastrous effect on fighting games by increasing input lag. Unfortunately, Street Fighter V doesn’t offer an in-game option to disable V-Sync, forcing players to edit the game’s configuration file themselves.

Once this option is taken care of, however, things get a little better for Street Fighter V players, but not enough to match the lower input lag in other fighting games. This disparity also carries over into online play, even though Mortal Kombat X sees a dramatic increase itself.

The second part of the video shouldn’t come as much of a surprise for veteran fighting game players (higher ping contributes to higher input lag during netplay), but it still provides great insight into the different ways titles handle online play.

To remain competitive, Street Fighter V needs to be sure to cater to players who can’t make it out to tournaments every week. While training at home will never match the experience one gets from stepping outside their comfort zone, adding in-game options to mitigate some of those speed bumps would work wonders in closing the gap.

Let us know in the comments if this video was helpful, and be sure to give Battle(non)sense some love as well. His hard work is much appreciated.

Source: Battle(non)sense, tip via Mike Z