Evan Johnson, a graduate student at North Carolina State University, presents a near-zero latency interactive display system at the Display Week I-Zone. The project moves away from traditional frame-based rendering, which involves buffering and synchronization, to a frameless architecture. In this model, individual pixels are rendered and immediately sent to the display, drastically reducing the time between user input and photon emission on the screen. The prototype demonstrates an average latency below two milliseconds across the entire panel, a significant reduction compared to many gaming consoles that can exceed 100 milliseconds.
—
HDMI® Technology is the foundation for the worldwide ecosystem of HDMI-connected devices; integrated with displays, set-top boxes, laptops, audio video receivers and other product types. Because of this global usage, manufacturers, resellers, integrators and consumers must be assured that their HDMI® products work seamlessly together and deliver the best possible performance by sourcing products from licensed HDMI Adopters or authorized resellers. For HDMI Cables, consumers can look for the official HDMI® Cable Certification Labels on packaging. Innovation continues with the latest HDMI 2.2 Specification that supports higher 96Gbps bandwidth and next-gen HDMI Fixed Rate Link technology to provide optimal audio and video for a wide range of device applications. Higher resolutions and refresh rates are supported, including up to 12K@120 and 16K@60. Additionally, more high-quality options are supported, including uncompressed full chroma formats such as 8K@60/4:4:4 and 4K@240/4:4:4 at 10-bit and 12-bit color.
—
The core of the technology is its frameless nature, where every pixel on the screen represents a slightly different and more up-to-date moment in time. This can result in some visual speckling during motion, as pixels are not part of a single coherent frame, but they reflect a more current game state. To measure performance, the team uses an Nvidia Latency Display Analyzer Tool (LDAT). The system is demonstrated running a game of Pong, where the immediate response to user input is clearly visible.
To achieve uniform low latency across the display, the project explores alternative scan patterns to the standard top-to-bottom raster scan, which inherently creates higher latency at the bottom of the screen. The team has developed and patented a “Cascastan” scan, a per-pixel random ordering that distributes the lowest latency points evenly across the panel. Other patented scan methods include a center scan and a region-of-interest based scan, which allow the area of lowest latency to be moved dynamically.
This frameless rendering approach is not compatible with current off-the-shelf display hardware or GPUs, as the concept of frames is deeply integrated into existing systems. The current prototype utilizes an LED panel driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico, which allows for addressing individual rows to update single pixels. The next step in development involves moving to an FPGA. The ideal hardware for this technology would be a random-access display where pixels can be addressed individually, with microLEDs seen as a promising future display technology for this application.
The system is envisioned not as a modular component for desktop PCs but as a fully integrated architecture for devices like tablets, gaming consoles, AR/VR headsets, and drone piloting systems where low latency is critical. The goal is to create a more natural and responsive human-computer interaction, which is particularly noticeable in touch interfaces and immersive AR/VR environments where input and output are closely coupled.
