How much does latency matter to you when gaming?

[yackar]

How much? does it differentiate between Life and Death? does it have an effect at all? do you even notice the difference between two computers with different amounts of latency? personally, after playing for about a year on my 32" flatscreen TV, that it was actually hindering my ability to play. When I had that feeling I'd make the headshot, Id only make it about half the time. That was because my TV is a Philips 4000 series, which, after some searching, is known for ridiculously high latencies. I was hesitant at first, but I went and took the test @ http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/, and found the absolute very best reaction time I could get was somewhere around 280ms. that plus 50-100 ping = 340-380ms of delay on even the best of my days. That's more than a third of a second, which in precision, should really matter (at least in my opinion). I put my old monitor to this test to see if it did better... I got 280 without even trying, so I pushed myself to take the test over and over. I averaged at 250-280 with occasional dips into 210s-230s. and twice I even managed to get under 75 ms! My old monitor is a Dell N2010Nb, and to my suprise, despite the fact that I don't have the ridiculous field of view anymore, I like it way better than my philips 4000 series TV. I tried a personal real world performance comparison in Battlefield 3, and my ridiculously low K/D ratio actually went up for a change! So, matter or not? I want to see other user's experiences with different latencies.

 

[Gam3r01]

Dont use TVs for gaming, thats my main advice on the topic.
What you are referring directly to is response times, not necessarily latency.

I find anything under 8ms response time to be fine, any lower and you dont really notice the difference. (Note there are different kinds of response times)