Networked Graphics

Chapter 11. Latency and consistency

Introduction

As we saw in Chapter 10, latency inevitably leads to inconsistencies in NVEs and NGs. Because state information takes time to traverse the network, the receivers might well have acted upon old state information which is invalidated by the update. Somehow the inconsistency needs to be solved. In this chapter we review several techniques that are used to compensate for, or to mask latency in NVEs and NGs. These solve the system-level view of consistency, but we’ll also be concerned with how masking or compensating for latency impacts the user experience, so the environments appears to be fair to the users. Two classes of consistency maintenance algorithms can be identified: conservative consistency ...