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Update: PC appears to be king for input latency in The King of Fighters 15 while PlayStation 5 lags behind the rest

Especially when placed next to the PS4 version

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Posted by Dakota 'DarkHorse' Hills • February 22, 2022 at 4:07 p.m. PST • Comments: 55

Update: Noodalls has now released his findings for The King of Fighters 15's input latency on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S as well as early results for PC, which have been added to the original story below.

The PlayStation 5 began garnering itself something of a reputation in the fighting game community for strangely including higher amounts of input lag compared to previous generation versions of the same title, and it still seems to be going on now.

With the early access period now open for The King of Fighters 15, tech wizard Nigel "Noodalls" Woodall put the launch edition of the new game to the test, which showed the PS5's latency reportedly remains higher than what it is on PlayStation 4.

According to Noodalls' newest experiments after running over 100 input tests, KOF15 on PS5 has an average latency of 90.67 ms.

This equates to around 5.44 frames of input lag on this next gen fighting game while being a few frames better on the older hardware.

Woodall's tests on the PS4 Pro revealed an average of 68.66 ms of delay, which equals 4.12 frames of lag.

The time it takes the PS4 to register a button being pressed fits into the average we've come to see from fighting games running on Unreal Engine 4 over the past generation, and there is still a way to shave off that extra frame on the newer console.

The PS4 version of KOF15 running on PS5 showed a 69.39 ms (4.16 frames) average for input lag, so players can get the slightly better feel for the trade off of some prettier graphics and load times.

These numbers match up very closely to previous latency tests performed during the KOF15 betas performed by someone else, albeit slightly smaller, meaning SNK may have made some minor improvements going into the launch build.

It's unclear why exactly the PS5 seems to run fighting games with 1–2 frames more of input lag next to the PS4, but the assumed issue could lie within the Unreal Engine 4 not being as optimized for the new generation or perhaps there could be something causing this in the console itself, considering we've seen similar results in Guilty Gear Strive last year.

The next gen Xbox versions of KOF15 are apparently even a bit better than either PlayStation SKU according to Noodalls' latest tests.

King of Fighters on the Xbox Series X reportedly has 55.22 ms (3.31 frames) of latency on average at 60hz and 53.30 ms (3.20 frames) at 120Hz.

The Xbox Series S is slightly higher at 59.62 ms (3.58 frames) at 60hz and 60.32 ms (3.62 frames) at 120hz.

Although he hasn't dived fully into the PC version of KOF15 yet, Noodalls has released his early findings on Steam, which reveals it to be even lower than Xbox.

The King of Fighters 15 reportedly has about 33ms, equating to a staggeringly low 1.98 frames of latency on PC at 60hz, and that matches up quite a bit to the results we've seen for Guilty Gear Strive as well.

Given that developers of other titles like Street Fighter 5, Tekken 7, Strive and even within SNK with Samurai Shodown, these numbers could be brought even lower across the board in future updates.

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