Display latency sucks, but I'm a little sympathetic in the particular case of rhythm games, which can have timing windows as small as 15 milliseconds (e.g. for a "Marvelous" in Dance Dance Revolution).

For comparison, for Virtual Reality ≤ 20 milliseconds is usually considered the target latency.

And Playstation 2 developers couldn't have predicted how display technology would change.

It wouldn't matter at all if they didn't add noticeable to an already-computed image.

Remember, this is lag added by the television software, not the PS2 system. We know this because if you take the pure hardware approach of component cables, there's no noticeable lag.

VR has an excuse. VR has to do an expensive computation to decide where all the pixels have to appear to seem real to the human eye. The TV just has to take a signal and display it on the screen. That's the identity function.

>And Playstation 2 developers couldn't have predicted how display technology would change.

Rather, they couldn't have predicted slowness of upscaling and refusal to implement an optimize-for-time option.