Controller to display latency

in Call of Duty ®

Akimitsu Hogge
Software Engineer
Activision Central Technology

My name is Aki and I’m a programmer for Activision Central Tech. I work with a small team in Portland Maine where we
tackle performance problems in Call of Duty titles.

Today we’re going to be discussing controller to display latency: that’s the shortest duration between a player pressing a
button and the player seeing the result of the press on screen. I’m only going to be discussing the game client, and won’t
be covering anything related to networking or the server.

We’re going to go over a dynamic throttling feature that was added to recent Call of Duty games to control the tradeoffs
that impact input latency, with the ultimate goal of reducing controller to display latency.
But first we’ll go over how we measure latency, and then we’ll dive into specific aspects of the engine that had to be
factored into the throttle. Finally I’ll discuss the implementation of the throttle and its impact on a recent game.