Gadgetory

logitech has been claiming for years now and Corsair recently joined them that their Wireless gaming mice are indistinguishable from their wired ones because they've managed to get the processing latency so low that either one is less than one millisecond the fastest poling or sample rate that's available over the USB connection and like that's pretty cool no cord dragging on your mouse hand has obvious benefits for gamers but the thing is is that we've mostly taken Logitech's word for it up until now because we've never had any of the equipment that we would need to validate their claims well no more so we recently rented a phantom 4k high-speed camera from Kaslow camera for our recent collaboration with gap from slo-mo guys and we figured what the hey we've already got it we might as well use it whoo that's hot speaking of hot this segue to our sponsor for today's video story blocks video story blocks offers you studio quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost check it out today at the link in the video description admittedly we haven't devised a way to intercept the signal from the mouse before it ever gets to the operating system video card driver game engine and finally your display so we aren't going to be able to address claims from brands like Logitech and Corsair about their mice achieving sub 1 millisecond transmission speeds what we can do however is determine whether any of the mice that we're looking at today including both wired and wireless models are faster or slower in a way that could possibly be meaningful to gamers because here's the thing our perception of mouse leg or Mouse latency is dictated by the total delay that we feel between moving our hands and seeing the corresponding action on the screen so as long as we can ensure consistency in all of our other variables any difference that we observe from one Mouse to the next comes down to the signal transmission time whether it's along a wire or whether it's wirelessly to a dongle let's have a look at our test right here we're running competitive shooter csgo on this Corsair Vengeance gaming rig with a core i7 8,700 and geforce r-tx 2080 we've paired this with one of the fastest gaming monitors around this 1080p 240 Hertz one from Acer to record each run and measure our total Mouse to screen latency we're using a phantom flex 4k from vision research at 4k 1000 frames per second so that means every frame here is just one millisecond now you might think that to get a precise measurement for each Mouse we could just move the mouse around with our arms and then count the frame delay but not so at a thousand frames per second any organic body is gonna have too much give to get a clear start point so we had to get a little bit more creative meat norm so named for its - naught or gates with Alex's creation here we can swing a hammer at the mouse and with these conductive surfaces on the backs of our mice and on the tip of our hammer we can record the exact moment of contact with the indicator LED that's on this breadboard here that removes the reliability of our measurements dramatically and it's pretty fun to do for our first round of testing we're gonna keep things simple we're gonna take one of logitech's high-performance wired mice so this is their new generation mx518 with their hero sensor and we're gonna put it head-to-head against one of their high performance wireless mice in this case the G 703 so we're gonna do the wired one first because the conventional wisdom would go that that's your that's your baseline right first round mx518 fantastic wow that's a really short delay our first run with the mx518 taught us a couple of things number one is that we could expect with a wired mouse anyway about 15 milliseconds of latency according to our measurements and that we could expect a high degree of consistency one other key takeaway was that the creation of the apparatus to light up the LED when the hammer hits the back of the mouse was entirely unnecessary as it turns out using different mode and premiere to examine two frames we could more easily identify the true starting point for our mouse movement I am fascinated by this test we really have to get the actual milliseconds this is really interesting that seems like a really big distance before it actually registers that doesn't seem right we're not making the rules here it is what it is now one special thing that we're making sure to do here is we're putting the dongle right here above the table to ensure that it's not subject to any unfair interference first wireless mouse test here we go with the G 703 Wireless we weren't quite sure what to expect Logitech claims the performance should be basically the same but our common sense tells us that it couldn't possibly be especially with respect to performance consistency because Wireless is far more susceptible to interference than a wired connection well as it turns out within the margin of error of our experiment they were the same wow that actually looks faster but might just be crazy so there you have it guys not only did we learn that our wireless mouse performed the same as our wired mouse within the margin of error of our experiment we also saw that they both performed incredibly consistently from one run to the next but since we've got the rig setup anyway we figured why not investigate some other manufacturers mice so we're gonna start with Corsairs dark or RGB se we chose this one because it's Corsairs sort of equivalent sub 1 millisecond latency Mouse and we wanted to know how their claims stack up Corsairs dark or RGB SC was an interesting one for us it was still within the margin of error of our experiment just as fast as both of the Logitech mice but when we averaged our results it did measure a little bit slower the next thing we wanted to find out on our voyage of discovery today was whether it actually matters if a mouse can be sent to a thousand Hertz polling rate so the final Mouse ultralight sunset has a bit of a bad reputation for being capped out at 500 Hertz does it matter only one way to know it actually tied for the lowest single response time but compared to the Logitech mice it was less consistent could this be due to the 500 Hertz pulling rate until we have a thousand Hertz monitor it'll be hard for us to tell we're not done yet though for our last test we pulled out a Logitech MX anywhere 2 Mouse this is by no means a piece of gaming equipment but it gives us a great point of comparison for all the high performance gaming mice that we've looked at so far well this was a great lesson for gamers everywhere if you want to have the best most responsive experience you're gonna want to choose a gaming mouse it was over double the average response time of all of our gaming grade mice and making matters worse that's with Logitech's 2.4 gigahertz wireless connection rather than bluetooth which introduces even further latency and more interference the final nail in its coffin for gaming is that the sudden acceleration from our hammer kick would cause the sensor in some cases to lose tracking and behave erratically so the conclusion here is pretty straightforward while I want to again acknowledge that we weren't able to test all the way down to one millisecond what we can take away from our experiment is that at least for Logitech we have validated their position that anyone who claims to be able to tell the difference between their wired and wireless mice is either imagining it or foolish but okay I tell you what I will I will guess this one as faster I'll say this one's wired Oh that's the wired mouse uh-oh that's bad okay in fairness to me those mice had slightly different cables on them and that was probably what I was picking up on now a secondary observation here is that Corsairs Wireless appears at least within the margin of error of our test to be on par with Logitech's though it is notable that our average results were slightly worse our next conclusion is that anyone claiming to be able to tell the difference between 500 Hertz and 1000 Hertz polling rates on a high-performance Mouse is also imagining it even if you were capable of feeling a two millisecond difference in responsiveness your monitor because you don't have more than a 240 Hertz display would not be able to display it finally do gaming mice have a value absolutely not only did our MX anywhere 2 which to be clear isn't even a terrible Mouse and we weren't even using with Bluetooth have measurably higher latency thanks at least partially to its 125 Hertz polling rate it also didn't track as well or as consistently perhaps thanks to its less sophisticated sensor or its power saving features speaking of saving I've been saving this segue for a long time this video is brought to you by story blocks you can get studio-quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost with story blocks video you can download all the stock video your heart desires 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