A new gaming mouse

General Discussion
41

It’s radio.

The mouse sensor generates an electrical signal for each axis when it’s moved, this signal is generated (usually for a gaming mouse) 1000 times per second. To simplify things (in a way that doesn’t change anything) let’s say the signal is simply a 1, and when there’s no movement on an axis you will instead have 0. So 1000 times per second the sensor will send a packet of two bits, one for each axis.

With a wired mouse, this binary stream can pretty much be sent straight through the cable, as the ones and zeroes are already electrically represented by high/low voltages. No extra conversion needed, and a 5v square wave travelling through two meters of copper cable can be considered to have zero interference, so the signal does not have to be filtered in any way.

In order to be able to send anything using radio, the digital information you want to send has to be “stuck” to a carrier wave by modulating it, and no matter how you do this, atleast one digital to analog conversion has to be performed in order to do this, and that conversion takes a small amount of time. Then the reciever has to perform an analog to digital conversion in order to recreate the digital data stream.

The 2.4GHz band is used by pretty much everything, so the receiver antenna will catch radiowaves generated by other things, all the time. Frequency hopping can be used to minimize interference, but not eliminate it. So some sort of filtering has to be performed, in order to be reasonably sure that you do not receive any signals not generated by the mouse. This can be done quite efficiently by marking the data actually sent by it, but you are guaranteed to have some degree of errors in the resulting stream. Those errors, as each one will only represent a mouse movement during a fraction of a second, will be virtually inconsequential at any given point in time, but they will be there, and the filtering/error reduction will add to the time it takes for a signal to get from the mouse sensor to the USB controller in your computer.

A wireless mouse will have higher latency than a wired one, and there will be more faults in the data stream. There is no need to test it, it’s simply a fact of electronics, RF engineering and computer science.

However, you can probably play this game for hours and every single shot you make will be at the exact same pixel position as it would be with a wired mouse. And the ones that aren’t will be at the pixel right next to it, which for all means and purposes is the same thing. Considering you don’t aim at individual pixels, but at objects that are much bigger, it’s a one in a million chance that a one-pixel error will mean you miss the entire object. So, at any given point in time, there isn’t a difference between a high quality wireless mouse and a wired one, you have an equal chance of making the shot.

But over time, the errors compound, and after a million, or a billion, shots, one of those will be one where a wired mouse would have caused you to hit the pixel on the very edge of the hitbox, but the wireless one made you hit the pixel next to it, resulting in a miss. And you wouldn’t know when this was the case.

Like I said, this doesn’t make any “real” difference to most people, as it’s so rare it’s virtually not happening and they’re not even aware of it if it does. But for someone with MY personality type, the knowledge that it’s a statistical certainty it will happen at some point (law of large numbers) is basically the same as having it happen often.

Just so we’re clear: I’m not saying it’s not a super mouse, or that you’re dumb for using a comfortable super mouse. I’m saying that I wouldn’t be able to do the same, as I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about the fact that I may have missed a shot that I would’ve hit with a wired mouse, without knowing it :slight_smile:

3 Likes
42

Nice headshot! :joy:

/golfclap

1 Like
43

It’s not this simple. Logitech put effort into making this mouse lagless. Some real effort. It’s not like any other (even rog) mouse.
I was on your opinion as well. But be open. Not even synthetic tests show higher delay on this than on wired mouses.
Here’s some research/test about it
gamersnexus.n et/guides/2594-wireless-mouse-click-latency-analysis-vs-wired

Twice as reactive as deathadder if I read this correctly.

I can’t really find anything about g903 vs zowie though. I could compare it to g502(g903 is more reactive by feels tbh). But I have no tools for it :confused: and my 2cent doesn’t worth a penny in this topic :smiley:
So difficult to test such things.

44

Clicks are one thing, movement information is sent thousands of times more often :slight_smile:

Although, I’m kind of curious as to how the wireless rig is configured, and how they are pulling the mouse clicks out of the usb cable. I mean yeah, they’re using a usb controller and read from it, but what mode are they using, and how do they filter :slight_smile:

Edit: The DeathAdder is by default set to 500hz, and can be set at 100hz. If it is set to 500hz in the Logitech demo, the average latency would be less than half, and so would the variance. I haven’t found any information on what was used, but if it’s at 500hz the results would make perfect sense while i did a huge “wtf”-face at the average shown in the video and article.

45

Logitech default is 500hz as well.(or 250??)
I’m telling you, it’s really good (I also used a deathadder before and it’s much better, only had zowie for a short time and while it was excellent it was… Just nothing special, g903 is the same without a wire!)
Also due the minimal amount of information sent even on 1000hz, or 2000, bandwidth is not an issue for the mouses. We aren’t displaying pictures, we send very, very, very simple and small data.

Try it mate. You won’t be disappointed. Im very picky with mouses, keyboards and monitors. And… with all hardware. Ill preorder the new Nvidia 2080ti shortly as well :confused: especially if my gtx1080ti sli proves to be slower… Awww and I was like really not expecting any hardware upgrade for a year or two :confused:

46

The trick is to minimize the latency between your actions and what is happening on screen.

If mouse a send info faster by 0.05 secs i would still pick that mouse over a wireless.

47

But it’s not faster. That’s what I’m saying. It’s AT LEAST as fast now!
Faster than a corded deathadder.

48

i am sorry but it still performances a bit worse then wired.

When u see 50% of esports pro ( fps genre) use wireless then the 2 can be competitors. But when its even worse by 0.1 % its better to use a wire.

Edit: another downside i hear most high skilled players say is that wireless mouses tend to be heavy.

49

Just checked, and Logitech runs at 1000hz by default, while Razer runs at 500hz. And that explains why the DA was so crazy slow, as I felt sure it should be about the same as my SteelSeries :slight_smile:

Like I said, I’m sure it’s a great mouse, and it seems to perform pretty much the same as the wired equivalent. However, it still is sensitive to its surroundings in a way that makes it impossible for me to use it.

It has a great sensor, it’s low latency, and it looks okay’ish. But when my wired SteelSeries performs equally good, I see no need to change :).

50

Believe me polling rate isn’t the reason for these times.(and my Logitechs default polling rate wasn’t 1000 hz for sure. I remember changing it. It can’t be 1000 default because it might hurt some old hw!)
Try it yourself.
And no it’s not sensitive to it’s surroundings. It’s not a 10 year old wireless mouse. It’s MADE for competitive gaming. Not for internet browsing.

I was the same as you but this crap really convinced me that I’m not ever gonna use wired mouse again.

51

The polling frequency has a major effect on the latency. What is actually happening in a digital mouse isn’t that a switch is closed and that causes a signal. Instead, the CPU in the mouse is constantly asking the switch “Are you closed? Are you closed? Are you closed?” and generates the signal each time. So when you close the switch, by pressing the button, that will not be registered until the next time the CPU asks about it. If it asks every second, a click short than that may be missed entirely.

The number of times per second that the CPU asks the buttons if they’re pressed, and compares the image from the sensor to the previous one, that is the polling frequency. If you have your mouse set to 500 it will ask for the state 500 times each second, and if you have it at 1000 it will ask 1000 times each second. Since the period between polls is twice as long, it will on average take twice as long for a click to be registered. You can compare it to the input lag in a singlethreaded game, like CS, that varies with framerate since it will only poll the mouse once per frame.

So yeah it’s very related. And what I was surprised by wasn’t the difference between the DA and the g903, but at the difference between the DA and a good gaming mouse. Once I realized Razer has 500hz by default, and no profile memory on the mouse, it made sense. Without onboard memory, it will run at the default until the driver changes it. Since the mouse was connected to the analyzer, there is no driver to tell it to gear up. The g903 has memory, and if you tell it to run at 1000hz, it will keep doing that until you change it.

So yeah, the comparison in the video is completely unfair and misleading, as the DA has the same latency as the g903 when running at 1000hz (I went and rechecked this). But, and this is a big one, it is still very impressive that the g903 had the same latency as a good wired mouse has. Even if something was to happen, forcing channel hopping to avoid interference, it would likely not add more than 2-3ms during that, and that would still be better than a lot of wired mice.

Thing is, 2.4ghz will always be sensitive to disturbances. I have read up on Lightspeed, and they have implemented the aggressive channel hopping I talked about earlier, aswell as a highly directional receiver and the option to boost the signal in order to drown interference. It will of course help a lot, but you will still never be as immune as a copper wire. Try placing a fast USB3 harddrive in front of the receiver and copy a large file :slight_smile:

I don’t think I make myself clear. Say that mouse had been tested inside of a high-voltage transformer station and managed to work without a single bit getting scrambled, for a month. I still wouldn’t be able to use it, just because of how I function. I would still know transmission errors are inherent in the technology used, and that any countermeasures are just that, countermeasures. It’s not the mouse that’s at fault here, it’s me :wink:

1 Like
52

You’re perfectly clear to this IT dude here who had to go through all that junk during his formal professional education. Can I send my apprentices your way so they don’t bother ME anymore? In exchange I’ll happily talk network and routing protocols with yours :grin:

53

Oh god, yes. I spent a third of my working hours today explaining to someone that there weren’t 50.000 machines active on the network, because HSRP.

54

I second this I got the rival 310 great for fps due to the sensors. Minimal designs good mice

55

It’s really difficult to test something like this. And my g903 operated at 500hz as factory default(I’ve reset it just for You!)

56

The point is that the g903 will keep polling at 1000hz once set, even if you unplug it and plug it into a host that have never even heard of Logitech. While the Deathadder will run at 500hz if it’s plugged into a host that isn’t running Synapse, or whatever the software is called.

There are plenty of people who test mice using a similar rig as in the article and post these results online. The Deathadder is getting between 4 and 6ms at 1000hz, while it gets 10-12 at 500hz. Same as other good mice.

And I can tell you it’s straight up impossible to get an average below 4-5ms at 500hz using a Lightspeed mouse. And I don’t mean “you can get 4-5ms at 500hz with a Lightspeed mouse”, so don’t interpret it like that. I’m saying that doing a poll of a switch, writing the result into a buffer, passing that result to something that speaks USB, and receiving it at the other end, will take 2ms or so. Then add that Lightspeed, according to specs, will add a minimum average of 1ms (0.5ms at each end), and finally the average delay from switch close to poll which at 500hz is 1ms. Now you’re at 4ms just for the things that has to be there for it to be possible to click something and have a 1 come out the other end. Then you add the fact that you have way more things going on in the mouse firmware (and any processing you do of the signals from buttons and sensor will scale the latency, not add to it, in the case of DA that does this) and that you’re not going to be using this in a Faraday cage, and you’ll swiftly be up to 6-7ms. If you have a super efficient build and firmware in your mouse, don’t do any other processing than discard outliers from the optical sensor, and everything else is super streamlined the entire way to the usb-controller on the host, going up to 1000hz will cut a ms of that, so you’re looking at 5-6ms. If you do artificial cpi using amplification and smoothing, and have a somewhat less efficient build, doubling the polling rate in a wired mouse (where USB polling skew is the only external factor) will halve the latency.

This is kind of hard to write on a tiny phone, hopefully it makes sense :slight_smile:

I’m not bashing your mouse. I’m actually hella impressed by it, that manages 5.5ms average wireless even under optimal conditions. You shouldn’t feel you have to defend it, I’m not attacking it. I am saying Logitech did an unnecessarily unfair comparison, as it’s obvious the mice are polling at different speed.

Comparisons aggregated by enthusiasts, under home conditions, puts the G900 at 2.3ms slower than the DA, and that’s STILL extremely impressive and doesn’t make a difference.

1 Like
57

when you play low eDPI and have a finger tip grip I recommend you the logitech g203. it is a very light mouse

58

The only thing is that again:
Logitechs default is 500 hz as factory default.
And that the test I linked wasn’t done by Logitech :slight_smile:
I cannot notice any difference between using my mouse as wired or wireless. But yeah let’s leave it like this. There are no real tests that show the results.
And 500hz equals to 2ms no…? 1000/500…

59

im rocking a Razer DeathAdder Elite
if u have a big handsize, then u will love it

60

Are you referring to this part?

If so, please take note of the average which will naturally be half of the actual polling cycle.