Quote Originally Posted by Collin_Sky View Post
So I just watched your video, because honestly at this point I figured I'd humor you, and something felt really off, I could notice a delay after every single GCD when using macros. It's really, really noticeable when watching it, I physically felt something was wrong (I have autism so this genuinely triggers that sort of reaction in me when I can tell something is off). I even had to mute the video and watch it without sound to make sure I wasn't imagining it due to the UI sounds.
I even logged into the game and tested my GCD to make sure I wasn't wrong and ground myself to something I can control.

My dude, you are definitely clipping on every single GCD, if you say you're not, I'm convinced you don't actually know what clipping is, or just haven't learned to feel small instances of clipping (similar to how some people can't tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps). But you are 100% clipping in your video. The GCD isn't smooth when it rolls over onto the next.
The video I watched, since you called someone else out for using the wrong video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-LgAGXETgA
I watched the video again, and I'm guessing what you're seeing is simply the difference in the timing of the button presses for macros and non-macros; when a button is pressed, it creates a flash over the button icons that temporarily obscures the GCD. For macros, this flash occurs much closer to the time the GCD rolls over than for non-macros, because macros have a shorter window in which they can be pressed to not clip the GCD. This results in an aesthetic difference, and I think this is what you are probably seeing.

However, I'm not satisfied with just thinking something; I wanted to get data that could either support or deny my hypothesis. So I started with some math.

That footage was taken on a PS5 running in performance mode at 60 fps. In that context, a single frame takes 1/60 of a second. There were 25 casts per test in that video. If there was a delay of even a single frame on each cast, then that would result in a roughly 0.4 second disparity between the macro test and the non-macro test. That's nearly half a second, which is a large enough disparity that we should easily be able to see it with the naked eye in the video.

As luck would have it, the macro test's 25th castbar completes right before the timer drops from 2:02 to 2:01. This is really convenient because it makes it super easy to compare this with the timing of the non-macro test. So to find out whether this delay exists, we just check the non-macro test as the timer goes from 2:02 to 2:01. If at that time the castbar has just completed, then we'll be able to tell that there isn't a 0.4 second disparity, and thus that there haven't been any frame delays. But if the 25th non-macro cast completes more than a quarter of a second earlier than the moment the clock rolls from 2:02 to 2:01, then that's evidence that every macro cast has clipped the GCD.

And sure enough, we can see that the castbar completion for the 25th non-macro cast doesn't occur 0.4 seconds early, which supports the hypothesis. So whatever you're seeing, the APM isn't dropping, and thus it can't be clipping. Conveniently, FF14's UI flashes whenever button is pressed, and thus in both tests you can very clearly see that I press a button only once for every cast, and that all of these presses occur before the GCD is available.