Aside from a better screen, longer battery life, faster RAM, refined sticks, and a less cluttered motherboard, people are still finding more advantages that the Deck OLED has over its LCD counterpart – things that not even Valve have mentioned themselves. One such advantage is the fact that, according to Digital Foundry, the OLED has less input lag than the original.

Using NVIDIA’s LDAT system to measure input lag, they mention that on average the OLED has a faster input response by 10 milliseconds, but it gets even better due to the OLED’s faster 90 Hz display, which plays “a key role when the Deck’s frame rate limiting options are engaged.” They tested two titles: DOOM Eternal and Crysis 3 Remastered. They measured the input lag between 90 Hz, 60 Hz, and 50 Hz.

On DOOM Eternal [at 60 FPS/Hz], end to end input lag – button to Photon, if you will – comes in at 77.2 milliseconds across a sample of 20 captures. That’s averaged out of course and this drops to 68.7 milliseconds on the OLED model. The faster you run a game, the lower its input lag. So it’s no surprise to see that at 90 HZ on OLED, input lag drops to 51.1 milliseconds.

Crysis 3 Remastered [at 90 FPS/Hz and 60 FPS/Hz] – it’s inherently a laggier game with LCD delivering a 97.7 millisecond end-to-end latency reading, dropping to 86.4 milliseconds on OLED. This time, an 11.3 millisecond reduction in input lag. 65.2 milliseconds at 90 Hz offers up a 32.5 millisecond reduction compared to LCD at 60 Hz.

Response times in Doom Eternal – LCD vs. OLED

They also compare the two games at 40 FPS, with a refresh rate of 40 Hz on the LCD model and 80 Hz on the OLED. There was a 22ms improvement with the OLED model on DOOM Eternal. At 30 FPS/90 Hz there was a 18ms advantage. Since Crysis 3 Remastered is a “laggier” game, there wasn’t as much of an improvement in response time, but it was still there, with a 16.3ms advantage on the OLED model at 40 FPS/80 Hz.

I won’t go over all the numbers here. Just watch the video for more details.

This is excellent. Gameplay should now feel more “snappy.” Fighting games especially will benefit from this improved response time.

Images credit of Digital Foundry.