This TV setting could be adding input lag to your games

You’ve been playing your favorite shooter, and something feels off. Your aim is sluggish, your dodges are late, and you can’t shake the feeling that the game isn’t responding the way it should.

Before you blame your controller or your internet connection, there’s a good chance the real culprit is hiding inside your TV’s picture settings. There are default TV settings you should disable to improve your experience, but motion smoothing in particular is the one sabotaging your gaming sessions without you even knowing it.

Motion smoothing sounds fancy, but here’s what it actually does

Your TV is inventing extra frames, and that’s not always a good thing

Motion smoothing, also known as motion interpolation, is a feature built into nearly every modern TV. Its job sounds simple enough: analyze the frames in a video signal and generate artificial frames in between to make motion look smoother. Movies are typically shot at 24 frames per second, while most TVs refresh at 60, 120, or even 240 times per second. Motion smoothing fills in those gaps by predicting where objects are heading and creating new frames to bridge the difference.

The technology works by buffering at least one real frame, analyzing it against the next one, and calculating what a transitional frame should look like. That entire process—buffering, analyzing, and generating—takes time. And that in the world of gaming, time is measured in milliseconds you can absolutely feel.

Why motion smoothing adds input lag to your games

That split-second delay? Your TV might be the culprit

Input lag is the delay between pressing a button on your controller and seeing the result on screen. Every millisecond counts, especially in competitive titles like Call of Duty, Rocket League, or Street Fighter. Most gamers start noticing lag around 40 to 50 ms, and skilled players can detect increases as small as 20 ms.

Because the TV needs to hold onto the current frame while it waits for the next one, so it can generate that artificial frame in between, it introduces a significant buffer delay. On many TVs, enabling motion smoothing at its highest setting can push input lag from a barely noticeable 10-15ms all the way up to 100ms or more, depending on your TV and the implementation of the feature. If you’re playing on a projector, the latency can get even worse.

To put it plainly, a TV in game mode might deliver input lag of around 10 to 15ms. Take that TV out of game mode with motion smoothing cranked up, and you could be staring at 60 to 120ms or worse. That’s the difference between landing a clutch headshot and watching your character fail to take a shot before your input even registers. This is one of the biggest reasons why you should stop using your TV’s default picture mode, especially if you’re gaming on it.

Yes, it’s probably enabled straight out of the box

Manufacturers love it—gamers don’t

Most manufacturers ship their TVs with motion smoothing enabled by default. And every brand gives it a different name, which makes it even harder to find. Samsung calls it Auto Motion Plus, LG labels it TruMotion, Sony uses MotionFlow, TCL hides it under Action Smoothing, Vizio calls theirs Smooth Motion Effect, Panasonic brands it Intelligent Frame Creation, Toshiba calls it ClearScan or MEMC, and if you’ve got a TV from a lesser-known manufacturer, you might be looking at a different name entirely.

Unless you’ve specifically gone into your picture settings and turned these off, there’s a good chance they’re active right now. And if you’re gaming without game mode enabled, you’re stacking even more post-processing on top, including noise reduction, dynamic contrast, edge enhancement, and more, each adding its own small delay that compounds the problem.

Turn on Game mode and instantly reduce input lag

The one setting that actually prioritizes responsiveness

The easiest way to fix this is to enable game mode on your TV. This dedicated setting strips away nearly all post-processing—including motion smoothing, noise reduction, and dynamic contrast— to deliver the video signal as fast as possible. Enabling it can drop input lag from over 60ms down to 10-15ms on most modern TVs.

You’ll typically find this under picture settings or picture mode. Some brands like LG go further with a Game Optimizer menu featuring a boost setting for even lower latency. Modern consoles like the PS5 and Xbox Series X also support Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM), which tells your TV to switch to game mode automatically when it detects a game. You may need to enable ALLM manually in your TV’s HDMI settings first, though.

If your TV lacks a dedicated game mode, you can still reduce lag manually. Dive into your picture settings and disable everything that processes the image: motion smoothing, noise reduction, dynamic contrast, edge enhancement, and flesh tone correction. Anything with words like dynamic, smooth, auto, or enhance in the name is adding delay to your games.

When motion smoothing actually makes sense

Sports and shows? Sure. Competitive shooters? Not so much.

Motion smoothing isn’t inherently bad. Watching sports, news, or reality TV, it can improve the experience by reducing jitter and making fast camera pans look cleaner. It was designed for passive viewing, where a few extra milliseconds of processing don’t matter because you’re not providing real-time input.

The trick is being intentional. Watch a football match with motion smoothing on? Perfectly fine. Boot up Elden Ring or Fortnite? Switch to game mode first. A handful of higher-end TVs even offer motion interpolation within their game mode with relatively minor lag penalties, but these are the exception, not the norm.

If your games have been feeling sluggish lately, don’t rush out to buy a new controller or upgrade your internet plan. Grab your TV remote, dive into the picture settings, and check whether motion smoothing is running in the background. Turning it off could be the single biggest improvement you make to your gaming experience—without spending a dime.