IN TIME, NOT JUST FAST:


WINNING GAMING SYSTEMS NEED RHYTHM, NOT JUST LOW LATENCY


By Mark Lippett, CEO, XMOS I


n the engineering of high-performance gaming systems, latency is often treated as a number to be minimised. Marketing


materials celebrate lower milliseconds; benchmarks compare input lag and audio delay; firmware teams chase faster loops and higher polling rates. But this framing, while convenient, misses something fundamental. Latency is not just a scalar metric. It is a


temporal behaviour of a system. What ultimately shapes user experience is


not simply how fast a system responds, but how predictably it does so. A system that responds in 10 milliseconds most of the time, but occasionally in 20, feels worse than one that consistently responds in 15. The human perceptual system is remarkably tolerant of delay, but deeply intolerant of inconsistency. This becomes especially apparent when


you look across three different domains in gaming: spatial audio rendering, input device polling, and AI-driven voice pipelines. Each operates on different data, different timescales, and different algorithms, yet all are governed by the same constraint: timing stability.


42 | MCV/DEVELOP July/August 2026


SPATIAL AUDIO: WHEN PHASE STOPS BEING STABLE Consider HRTF-based spatial audio, where the goal is to convincingly place sounds in three-dimensional space using headphones. At a conceptual level, this depends on maintaining a precise relationship between the signals reaching the left and right ears. These relationships exist on the scale of microseconds. The brain uses them to infer direction, distance, and even elevation. In a real system, audio is processed in buffers,


scheduled on threads, and passed through multiple stages of DSP. Even if each stage is individually correct, small variations in when buffers are processed begin to creep in. A frame arrives slightly earlier, the next slightly later. Over time, the phase relationship between channels is not fixed; it wobbles. This is where latency stops being about delay


and starts being about coherence. The result is rarely dramatic. Instead of a


sound snapping cleanly into position, it feels slightly unstable. Users may not describe this as a latency issue at all; they may blame the HRTF model, or the headphone quality. But the root cause is often timing instability.


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