Evidence that Macros Do NOT Cause GCD Delay or Lost Casts

[LilimoLimomo]

Okay, I've done a rudimentary translation of the article and it was very thoughtful. I learned a few things and thought it was a worthwhile read, but I'll let it speak for itself. Everything below here is the article, the original text can be found at: https://jp.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes.../blog/4722988/.

As you can see, there is no delay in the GCD even if you change the normal weapon skill pre-entry to the 15-line rapid-fire macro pseudo pre-entry.

The reason why there is a 5-frame delay with the 15-line rapid-fire macro at 60fps is because the pseudo pre-entry acceptance time is too short at 60fps, so some inputs fail to be pre-entered.

As I said before, normal weapon skill pre-entry is a process that "determines whether the GCD has cleared every frame, and if it has, the next weapon skill occurs," while the 15-line rapid-fire pseudo pre-entry macro is a process that "executes a weapon skill every frame, and if the GCD has cleared, the weapon skill occurs."

Although there is a slight difference in the weight of the processing, the frame (calculation result) at which the weapon skill occurs does not change, so it is thought that there will be no significant delay in the GCD even if you change to the 15-line rapid-fire macro. The results of this test also suggest this.

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However, is it always okay to macro skills? The biggest problem with macroing skills is that the time it takes to input in advance is short. Since macros are processed every frame, 14 lines at 60fps (1 frame is 0.01666 seconds) is only 0.2333 seconds.

Normal weapon skill input is said to take about 0.6 seconds to input in advance, so 0.2333 seconds is quite short. In fact, if you try it, you will find that it is almost impossible to continue inputting in advance for 0.2333 seconds.

Therefore, I think that in order to use pseudo input in advance macros in actual combat, the frame rate will have to be lowered to about 30fps.

However, the problem here is that, as can be seen from the above test results, there is no GCD delay even when you make a pseudo input in advance macro for weapon skills, but if you lower the game frame rate, there will be a GCD delay even when you input normal weapon skills in advance.

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First of all, as mentioned above, FF14 skills occur "every frame", so even if the GCD ends, the next weapon skill does not activate immediately, but "in the next frame after the GCD ends". This is important.

Ultimately, a game is a 60fps flip book. 60 flip books per second are made to look like continuous motion.

And 60fps means that there is a gap of about 0.01666 seconds between each frame. Therefore, there is a delay of 0 to 0.01666 seconds between the end of the GCD and the next frame (skill activation). If frames always came every 0.01666 seconds, that would be a different story, but there is a slight difference, so on average, the delay is 0.008333 seconds.

If this is 30 fps, then from the end of the GCD to the next frame (skill occurrence), there is an average delay of 0.01666 seconds.

If 60 fps becomes 30 fps, the actual GCD will be increased by an average of +0.008333 seconds, so if you punch for 180 seconds (about 74 times) with a GCD of 2.41 seconds, the total delay will be about 0.6166 seconds.

In the above test, the GCD is delayed by about 0.716 seconds at 30 fps, so it can be said that it is roughly as expected.

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In addition, if the interval between frames is always fixed at 0.01666 seconds, the GCD can only change in 0.01666 second increments, so there should be a delay of 1.233 seconds when changing from 60fps to 30fps. However, this did not happen, so it seems safe to assume that there is quite a bit of variation in the time per frame.

If you lower 60fps to 30fps, it seems safe to say that the GCD will increase by 0.01 seconds (about 100 in substats). In that case, 60fps would be better, but warriors have no value unless they use macros to send Nascent Glint to others, so I am hesitant to go to 60fps. Well, the mechanics of Nascent Glint are so bad that they should definitely be abolished in 6.0...

Or rather, if you play end content at 60fps, your PC will heat up tremendously, so it's not possible... I guess it's impossible to stick with the top players with just a notebook...

Other than that, the 14-line consecutive tapping pseudo-pre-input macro has the advantage that you can pre-input from outside the attack range. Since you can't pre-input from outside the range of a normal skill, it's difficult to "attack the moment you come within range" manually. However, the 14-line consecutive tapping macro makes this possible, so for example, you can "run up and hit Onslaught the moment you come within Onslaught's range"

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For now, please remember that

× If you make a weapon skill into a macro, you can't input it ahead of time

〇 If you make a weapon skill into a macro with a 15-line pseudo-pre-input macro, you can input it ahead of time

but the input time is short