32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling.
Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, maybe even using some form of inverse kinematics, so that when you move your hand towards a small button aiming is smoothly assisted, and/or click target is helpfully adjusted in size to enhance Fitt's law compliance (like iOS keyboard keys dynamically changing sizes depending on the sequence of letters, hence words you type)
Of course this bites hard outside of this environment. It seems Mac OS X needs an API to provide some form of raw value access to the pointer so that arbitrary software (notably games) can conduct its own analysis.
Anecdotally, my personal experience has been that it never bothered me, neither in games (FPS and RTS) nor in WIMP.
IMO a more likely answer: 32ms / 2 = 16ms, the typical frame time for a monitor running at 60 Hz. Also the post noted disabling QuartzExtreme (GPU accelerated rendering) fixed the issue. I suppose the mouse cursor is drawn with GPU acceleration. Then, to optimise rendering, the window system uses double buffering (a common technique) - however, double-buffering has the well-known side-effect of introducing a one frame delay. So it would take 16ms to see your mouse cursor update, but with double buffering it takes 32ms.
I think Windows uses a special graphics card feature (an "overlay" IIRC) to update the mouse cursor independently of the double buffered window system. I noticed moving windows became ever so slightly more laggy going from XP to Vista - probably because the window system became GPU accelerated.
When working on drivers for capacitive touchscreens (of which trackpads are a pretty close sibling), we put all kinds of IIR filtering in there to smooth out the cursor and usually a variance filter to take away noise. Since those filters (esp. IIR) rely on data from previous scans, they naturally introduce a delay into the chain.
Usually this is all on the sensing side and not the host side. Perhaps there's some trackpad filtering that's being applied to the mouse when it didn't need to be?
I'm a little surprised that mouse state is something that a modern OS would be sampling (as opposed to, say, getting events 'pushed' by the device up through the driver). Or is this one of those "all event systems are really sampling once you look deep enough" things?
I was recently using an algorithm for determining control points for a bezier curve. You need 4 total points to accurately determine the curve, maybe there is a similar curve that apple is solving for?
Longtime Mac user here... for what it's worth, I don't know what the OP is referring to. I use both Mac and Windows regularly (home vs work), and I don't see a noticeable difference. Maybe I've just gotten used to it. Definitely isn't a problem for me.
Windows and Linux (Ubuntu Gnome or whatnot) have a much much much more responsive mouse input for me than Mac OS X. Maybe some people don't notice this, but for those who do, it's very annoying. It's inconceivable to me how somebody doesn't notice it, especially if OS X is supposed to be for graphic designers who use the mouse a lot. Maybe they all have Wacom or some such tablets.
It's much harder to hit any buttons because you can't just speedily mouse over it, you have to use visual feedback to inch on it. And it causes much more stress and strain on your hand, wrist, elbow, eyes and everything. No matter what mouse hardware you are using. The same mice work very well in Windows and Ubuntu. The OS X drivers just suck. I've tried USB overdrive, mouse settings and everything. The basic lag just doesn't go away.
Too bad some keyboard shortcuts like for scrolling work really bad in OSX too - the cursor stays in one place when going up or down pages meaning you have to use the mouse.
The cursor jumping is another crazy issue indeed. You never know where it is going to be once you go over a certain speed threshold.
(Writing this from OS X. Otherwise it's quite nice.)
Caveat: I used to play Quake where the difference between 60 and 77 FPS is life and death. Everybody used high rate CRT:s and clocked their mice to 500 Hz or so. Here's a real mouse test: http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1265679 . I'm annoyed at the mushy interfaces that electronics could have gotten rid of decades ago. It's somehow just a less stressful situation to take photos or browse them in a camera with less delay for example.
That is, until I installed Team Fortress 2 for office LAN party. Having played it on Windows, it was a world of difference - OS X version seemed so inaccurate, even after getting rid of acceleration.
This is part of the problem, I think. If enough people noticed it, it would have been fixed a long time ago. It's probably similar to how some people don't notice the rainbow effect on DLP projectors, and others do.
I had the same reaction. Then I realized that I've never used my Mac for high performance gaming of any kind. As a longtime Mac user (since 1984!), it just seems wrong to play games on a Mac.
I'm glad someone posted about this mouse problem. It is the most annoying thing that prevented me from switching to a mac for a long time. I was telling my friends that the mouse was not behaving the same way in Mac Os X and Windows. They were all saying that I was imagining it. I switched to Mac a year ago and got use to it, but I can still feel a difference.
I notice the lag on my Mac. It feels like the mouse is stuck in mud compared to using the mouse on the Windows. When I first got my Macbook about 3 years ago, I tried like 6 or 7 different mouse and acceleration software, and they all acted the same. The trackpad works fine though.
Do you use a mouse? I've never been able to notice it with a trackpad (because trackpads are inherently less precise anyway, and seldom used for gaming). It has been painfully noticeable on both Macbook Pros I've owned (one circa Tiger, the other circa Lion).
Same here, only Mac though. I don't game and haven't noticed this "lag". I currently have a MacBook Pro, and an iMac with a Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. Don't see it anywhere.
Newish Mac user here. The "feel" of mouse cursor movement is one of the few areas were Windows is superior. Years ago something like this was a big issue in Linux/X.org aswell but recently it has been fixed, atleast it feels like it for me.
I have noticed this "lag" with my magic mouse. Until now I have assumed there is something wrong with the hardware in it. Or that the bluetooth connection was breaking up. When I use the build in trackpad I have never noticed any lag.
Since Apple normally pay attention to details like this, im suprised that they have ignored this issue for so long.
If you use it for a while you might become blind to it?
I don't mind the mouse lag in normal use, but it's very annoying in FPS games. I've actually spent a day or two tweaking OS X mouse acceleration curves and whatever settings I could find. At the desktop I could get more "windows-y" feel, but always when I tried new settings TF2 the feeling was still wrong.
The lag author described is a plausible cause for my experiences.
Yes! This was my biggest gripe when switching from Windows - the mouse 'feel' is, well, wrong. I played around with the mouse settings, downloaded software to change the acceleration curve - nothing worked!
I'm now used to the mouse behaviour on OS X, but every time I have to switch back to Windows to do some testing I realise what I'm missing.
The mouse is such a crucial part of the experience it's odd that Apple haven't gotten it right.
The differing mouse "feel" that you're describing is most likely a result of the different mouse acceleration curve that OS X uses. (Mentioned in the article) I've noticed this too but I was able to resolve it by changing the mouse acceleration curve using this tool: http://triq.net/articles/mouse-acceleration-preference-pane-... Now I think it feels just as nice as Windows.
I expected to open this thread and see a bunch of "I've been using Macs for a long time and I've never seen a problem," and I was not disappointed.
Most people are not sensitive to minute changes in the way a mouse moves and feels. I've been a long, long time Windows user, and I absolutely love the way the mouse feels on a Windows system. I used to be a gamer as well, so I appreciate precise input, which is why I prefer high-resolution wired mice over wireless ones.
There is definitely a lag in OS X, and it drives me absolutely crazy. I started using OS X when Tiger came out, and I haven't seen any improvement through Snow Leopard (haven't used Lion yet). I mis-click on stuff all the time and it breaks my concentration having to focus so hard on the mouse. I am definitely willing to pay for a fix!
I should also note I tried USB Overdrive and another utility (name escapes me atm), but to no avail. Also, like many other people here, the touchpad is absolutely fantastic, I only see the issue with connected mice. This is probably due to the fact that I don't do graphics or precise movements with the touchpad, so it's much much more tolerable.
Am I the only person that loves the mouse/trackpad feel in OS X? Maybe it's because I've gotten too used to it, but I find it somewhat annoying to switch to Win or Ubuntu because of the different feel they have. I was using Ubuntu for about 6 months last year and never quite got used to how jumpy it felt (and yes, I did play with the mouse settings).
Played Starcraft/SC2 at a fairly decent level. To an RTS player the lag is extremely maddening as every mouse movement seems a bit off. (to get a good feel for exactly what's off, try to repeatedly draw diagonal strokes of the same size as fast as possible in any paint application for a good minute or two. Do it in both Windows and OSX and you'll notice something feels off about the OS you're not used to)
I tried a large number of things to get the feel right (all the old blog posts said that only acceleration was to blame), but even with mouse acceleration disabled, something felt off. Right now I only feel comfortable using my mac with mouse acceleration set to -2x for some reason.
I eventually just gave up and uninstalled SC2 from OSX. Now I only play it whenever I'm dual booted into Windows. Almost all the other mac users I know who play SC2 use this solution.
You can download the driver without buying a new mouse (or lost your disc). I've plugged in Logitech mice with Microsoft Mouse installed before and it still seemed to work fine. http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/29220/microsoft-mouse
I think the complaint in this article is laughably petty. I've never noticed a lag. But on the topic of mice, I bought a Kensington mini-mouse about three years ago that I've used with three different laptops (2 Macs and a Thinkpad) and to this day I've never noticed a difference between any of the computers. I would recommend it just for its size and functionality, it's the best mouse I've ever used. I didn't even have to install a driver for it, it just works immediately when I plug it into my Pro. It does feel faster than the trackpad but I think it's just because of the nature of trackpad vs. a mouse and not because of any noticeable lag.
I've always had this problem, and as a result I really can't use an external mouse with OSX. I've never had a problem with using the trackpads.
Like one of the commenters mentioned, using synergy from a Linux PC solves the problem for me. For a period, I actually resorted to running a Parallels instance of Linux with the external mouse attached to it, and setting up synergy to share the mouse pointer with OSX.
I'd like to run Linux as the main OS on my MacBook Pro, but in Linux the problem is the opposite: I've never found any driver / setting that makes the touchpad work really well under Linux (any hints would be appreciated - of course, I could always run OSX in VirtualBox under Linux, connect the touchpad to OSX and share it using synergy.... :)
Yeah, that's the one reason I never really run Ubuntu on my Air, even after I successfully jumped through all the hoops to get it installed. :)
I tried several different sets of tweaks but none of them felt right. Especially, I don't think any of them let you select with one finger and then drag with a second.
Touchpad support in Linux is a crapshoot and the uni-button, multitouch touchpads are even worse. If you poke around the Ubuntu forums there is a rewrite of the touchpad driver that works better for Macs. Then you just have to deal with the atrocious battery life compared to OS X (though that has to do with MBP's lovely implementation of EFI and the graphics switching).
I always knew that there was something off about the Mac OS X mouse pointer, but no one I knew really thought anything of it. Coming from using high end gaming mice on Windows machines for 8+ years, I could feel the difference with the mouse pointer on Macs having a slight lag to it no matter how fast the machine.
That being said, Mac touchpads feel like heaven and I haven't used a single PC touchpad that even comes close to it.
I noticed the exact opposite to be true. I regularly use Windows, Linux and OSX, and OSX seems to be the only OS that gets mouse movement right.
The cursor moves (at least subjectively) exactly like my fingers on the trackpad. On Windows/Linux it always seems either too slow or too fast.
There are a lot of ways for mouse input to be annoying for a particular OS / user. The bug described by the article, though, is not an area of "preference." The article claims that every device input to the mousing system takes [an extra? at least?] 32ms to be reflected in the state of the window manager.
To the question of whether it's "noticeable" or not, it'd be cool if someone wrote a driver or extension to intentionally add some additional lag. So even if we couldn't tell whether 15ms felt "snappier" than 32ms, we could at least report on whether 64ms feels "floatier" than 32ms, for example.
Not totally surprising that QuartzExtreme was mentioned. Flowing everything through a resolution-independence engine (right?) doesn't sound like it'd be free, even with fast procs and graphics cards.
I think this is plausible, but I don't think it's right - mouse input seems to happen when I want it to, I just have no idea where the cursor will end up. I hate hate hate using a mouse on my mac, it's probably the most elbow, wrist and shoulder harming activity I do.
I simply can't, after 4 years, move the mouse swiftly, and precisely to a point on the screen that I want. It falls short, it goes too far. I slow down to be more precise and the acceleration curve makes it go too annoyingly slow. I speed up and the cursor flies all over the screen. The cursor movement speed feels random and useless. I can't imagine how anybody tolerates it.
It's bloody annoying and the fact that there's not an option to just turn the stupid acceleration off is mind boggling.
I don't have these problems on Windows, Ubuntu, QNX, Haiku, Amiga OS, GEOS on the C64, RISC OS, the SNES mouse, etc. It's only OS X.
I don't even recall having the issue on MacOS.
I don't know if it was because I was damaged as a gamer when I was younger and can't appreciate something about the Apple way of handling mice, or Apple is just doing something wrong, but the way the device is handled on practically every other system I've ever used doesn't work like it does in OS X. It's infuriating and I've spent countless hours trying to fix it.
It's like my right arm has some debilitating muscle disease where I can't quite control what my arm does -- I can only give it vague directions and hope it ends up more or less where I want it to, then shift gears and take my time to get it to where I want it to go.
Thanks! I hate OSX mouse. If it's not for the good trackpads on MacBooks and the new trackpad, I could have gone back completely to Windows.
Bought Logitech/Microsoft/Cheap store brands, none of them gives a smooth mouse movement on OSX. It feels like someone's holding ur hand while using the mouse.
This problem annoys me a lot. I have a KVM switch and switch between Windows and OS X a lot. Every time I switch from Windows back to OS X the mouse behaviour is noticeably different and a moment is spent self correcting the mouse and quickly relearning it.
I have tried a few different mouse acceleration fixes/apps but still can't get it to feel right. This article explains why nothing I've tried works well.
I found a hardware solution to this, it's not going to sound great though, but it worked for me.
I found that all optical mice suffer from a kind of blindness when faced with surfaces that do not have sufficient contrast and crucially sufficient variety in the pattern.
It's as if the mouse thinks it's still looking at the same spot if its moved on a surface like this, hence the delayed reaction or lag.
I searched far and wide for a suitable surface and I found a picture of pebbles on a beach worked best as long as the surface of the picture is also matt and not glossy.
This may fix the problem for some, but at least for me the exact same mice and mousepads worked fine in Windows and Ubuntu. It's an OS X software issue.
Got a Razer Deathadder, they come with their own OSX drivers that seem to circumvent the issue. Also sad to see so many Magic Mouse users here ;) I know everybody has their own preferences, but that is not a good mouse.
I actually used a Razer Imperator, but I found it to be very flaky: about once an hour it would lose the plot completely and I'd have to unplug and reinsert the USB cable. Not a great experience in-game :-( I don't know if it was that particular mouse or the OS/X driver that was causing me problems, though.
I switched to a Steelseries Xai, and I've been loving it. It doesn't have any special mac drivers but all of the fancy settings are controllable via a little LCD screen on the bottom of the mouse.
I'm not sure if its affected by this "32 ms" problem. I only use OS/X so I might just be used to it at this point.
I have a Deathadder 3g Spawn and I don't use the Razer drivers.
If I look at my mouse in the app "USB Prober" I see OS X uses a 2ms interrupt to poll the mouse. If I'm not completely off that's 500Hz. More than the 125Hz that seems to be default USB polling frequency.
The author is probably right that there is an issue somewhere, but since I've been using SteerMouse (http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/) I haven't had any mouse annoyances anymore.
Not sure what it changed though; I thought it was the acceleration curve but for all I know it could be replacing the entire OS X mouse driver, laggy code and all.
The author says that the bug is in the OS X kernel, not in any driver, so if he's right, changing a driver would not fix it, which is a pity.
I've also had Windows friends complain about mouse lag on my OS X. I've always thought it was due to the different acceleration curves, but disabling OS X mouse acceleration never seemed to fix it.
Me too. I was very unhappy with the way the mouse felt on OS X. I even considered switching. Then I found SteerMouse, and now I'm a happy camper. Highly recommended.
I've long disliked the acceleration ‘feel’ of Mac OS X, and have worked around it with acceleration-curve adjustments etc., but I find the explanation provided highly doubtful. Why? Well, for one: various games circumvent OS X’s own mouse speed/acceleration settings, and when they do so instantly reproduce the ‘feel’ from Windows. The same is true when emulating Windows through virtualisation software. If this was a hardware lag issue, then surely both of these would be affected too? And even were it a hardware issue, it shows that you can remedy it in software.
I'd long believed that the problem would never be addressed, and then a couple of months ago I used a new Apple Magic Mouse with Lion; the acceleration and speed was so good out of the box that I didn't install USB Overdrive as part of my new Mac setup routine for the first time in over 5 years. Could it be that it's a driver issue, or just different devices have different acceleration characteristics? Perhaps, but whatever the case might be, I'm far less inclined to attribute it to input lag.
> The problem is caused by a bug somewhere at the windowserver level
> of Mac OS X, and not by a mouse driver. You can supposedly avoid
> the issue by disabling QuartzExtreme.
So not hardware-level, but UI level. So it would make sense that it would not happen in games that don't use the windowserver's cursor.
You used to be able to get rid of this (or at least dramatically reduce it) by turning off "ignore accidental input". Sadly, 10.7 doesn't appear to have an equivalent, at least in the UI.
Changing that option changed a lot. I loved it. But 10.7 is a bit better at managing it than it used to be, or it feels that way to me, so I don't mind as much as I did.
The mouse has always felt 'different' to me on OSX. I think this explains half of it, the other part being that the hotspot pixel for the cursor isn't actually at the tip, but two pixels down.
[+] [-] lloeki|14 years ago|reply
32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling.
Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, maybe even using some form of inverse kinematics, so that when you move your hand towards a small button aiming is smoothly assisted, and/or click target is helpfully adjusted in size to enhance Fitt's law compliance (like iOS keyboard keys dynamically changing sizes depending on the sequence of letters, hence words you type)
Of course this bites hard outside of this environment. It seems Mac OS X needs an API to provide some form of raw value access to the pointer so that arbitrary software (notably games) can conduct its own analysis.
Anecdotally, my personal experience has been that it never bothered me, neither in games (FPS and RTS) nor in WIMP.
[+] [-] AshleysBrain|14 years ago|reply
I think Windows uses a special graphics card feature (an "overlay" IIRC) to update the mouse cursor independently of the double buffered window system. I noticed moving windows became ever so slightly more laggy going from XP to Vista - probably because the window system became GPU accelerated.
[+] [-] joezydeco|14 years ago|reply
Usually this is all on the sensing side and not the host side. Perhaps there's some trackpad filtering that's being applied to the mouse when it didn't need to be?
[+] [-] feralchimp|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanalltogether|14 years ago|reply
http://www.antigrain.com/research/bezier_interpolation/
// Assume we need to calculate the control
// points between (x1,y1) and (x2,y2).
// Then x0,y0 - the previous vertex,
// x3,y3 - the next one.
[+] [-] eykanal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gravityloss|14 years ago|reply
It's much harder to hit any buttons because you can't just speedily mouse over it, you have to use visual feedback to inch on it. And it causes much more stress and strain on your hand, wrist, elbow, eyes and everything. No matter what mouse hardware you are using. The same mice work very well in Windows and Ubuntu. The OS X drivers just suck. I've tried USB overdrive, mouse settings and everything. The basic lag just doesn't go away.
Too bad some keyboard shortcuts like for scrolling work really bad in OSX too - the cursor stays in one place when going up or down pages meaning you have to use the mouse.
The cursor jumping is another crazy issue indeed. You never know where it is going to be once you go over a certain speed threshold.
(Writing this from OS X. Otherwise it's quite nice.)
Caveat: I used to play Quake where the difference between 60 and 77 FPS is life and death. Everybody used high rate CRT:s and clocked their mice to 500 Hz or so. Here's a real mouse test: http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1265679 . I'm annoyed at the mushy interfaces that electronics could have gotten rid of decades ago. It's somehow just a less stressful situation to take photos or browse them in a camera with less delay for example.
[+] [-] silversmith|14 years ago|reply
That is, until I installed Team Fortress 2 for office LAN party. Having played it on Windows, it was a world of difference - OS X version seemed so inaccurate, even after getting rid of acceleration.
[+] [-] gnaffle|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunchild|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gouggoug|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackernewser|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bnycum|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melloclello|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bni|14 years ago|reply
I have noticed this "lag" with my magic mouse. Until now I have assumed there is something wrong with the hardware in it. Or that the bluetooth connection was breaking up. When I use the build in trackpad I have never noticed any lag.
Since Apple normally pay attention to details like this, im suprised that they have ignored this issue for so long.
If you use it for a while you might become blind to it?
[+] [-] lautis|14 years ago|reply
The lag author described is a plausible cause for my experiences.
[+] [-] MarkMc|14 years ago|reply
I'm now used to the mouse behaviour on OS X, but every time I have to switch back to Windows to do some testing I realise what I'm missing.
The mouse is such a crucial part of the experience it's odd that Apple haven't gotten it right.
[+] [-] cmagahern|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirkules|14 years ago|reply
Most people are not sensitive to minute changes in the way a mouse moves and feels. I've been a long, long time Windows user, and I absolutely love the way the mouse feels on a Windows system. I used to be a gamer as well, so I appreciate precise input, which is why I prefer high-resolution wired mice over wireless ones.
There is definitely a lag in OS X, and it drives me absolutely crazy. I started using OS X when Tiger came out, and I haven't seen any improvement through Snow Leopard (haven't used Lion yet). I mis-click on stuff all the time and it breaks my concentration having to focus so hard on the mouse. I am definitely willing to pay for a fix!
I should also note I tried USB Overdrive and another utility (name escapes me atm), but to no avail. Also, like many other people here, the touchpad is absolutely fantastic, I only see the issue with connected mice. This is probably due to the fact that I don't do graphics or precise movements with the touchpad, so it's much much more tolerable.
[+] [-] colincsl|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cixelyn|14 years ago|reply
Played Starcraft/SC2 at a fairly decent level. To an RTS player the lag is extremely maddening as every mouse movement seems a bit off. (to get a good feel for exactly what's off, try to repeatedly draw diagonal strokes of the same size as fast as possible in any paint application for a good minute or two. Do it in both Windows and OSX and you'll notice something feels off about the OS you're not used to)
I tried a large number of things to get the feel right (all the old blog posts said that only acceleration was to blame), but even with mouse acceleration disabled, something felt off. Right now I only feel comfortable using my mac with mouse acceleration set to -2x for some reason.
I eventually just gave up and uninstalled SC2 from OSX. Now I only play it whenever I'm dual booted into Windows. Almost all the other mac users I know who play SC2 use this solution.
[+] [-] cameldrv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cowpewter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjj|14 years ago|reply
This could be great news.
[+] [-] artursapek|14 years ago|reply
The model I have is very similar to this one: http://www.amazon.com/Kensington-K72346US-Netbooks-Buttons-S...
It used to be on the Apple store website where I bought it but they seem to have removed it.
[+] [-] sjs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnaffle|14 years ago|reply
Like one of the commenters mentioned, using synergy from a Linux PC solves the problem for me. For a period, I actually resorted to running a Parallels instance of Linux with the external mouse attached to it, and setting up synergy to share the mouse pointer with OSX.
I'd like to run Linux as the main OS on my MacBook Pro, but in Linux the problem is the opposite: I've never found any driver / setting that makes the touchpad work really well under Linux (any hints would be appreciated - of course, I could always run OSX in VirtualBox under Linux, connect the touchpad to OSX and share it using synergy.... :)
[+] [-] starwed|14 years ago|reply
I tried several different sets of tweaks but none of them felt right. Especially, I don't think any of them let you select with one finger and then drag with a second.
(Last I tested was about 6 months ago, I'd say.)
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drivebyacct2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oacgnol|14 years ago|reply
That being said, Mac touchpads feel like heaven and I haven't used a single PC touchpad that even comes close to it.
[+] [-] netmute|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feralchimp|14 years ago|reply
To the question of whether it's "noticeable" or not, it'd be cool if someone wrote a driver or extension to intentionally add some additional lag. So even if we couldn't tell whether 15ms felt "snappier" than 32ms, we could at least report on whether 64ms feels "floatier" than 32ms, for example.
Not totally surprising that QuartzExtreme was mentioned. Flowing everything through a resolution-independence engine (right?) doesn't sound like it'd be free, even with fast procs and graphics cards.
[+] [-] tikhonj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|14 years ago|reply
I simply can't, after 4 years, move the mouse swiftly, and precisely to a point on the screen that I want. It falls short, it goes too far. I slow down to be more precise and the acceleration curve makes it go too annoyingly slow. I speed up and the cursor flies all over the screen. The cursor movement speed feels random and useless. I can't imagine how anybody tolerates it.
It's bloody annoying and the fact that there's not an option to just turn the stupid acceleration off is mind boggling.
I don't have these problems on Windows, Ubuntu, QNX, Haiku, Amiga OS, GEOS on the C64, RISC OS, the SNES mouse, etc. It's only OS X.
I don't even recall having the issue on MacOS.
I don't know if it was because I was damaged as a gamer when I was younger and can't appreciate something about the Apple way of handling mice, or Apple is just doing something wrong, but the way the device is handled on practically every other system I've ever used doesn't work like it does in OS X. It's infuriating and I've spent countless hours trying to fix it.
It's like my right arm has some debilitating muscle disease where I can't quite control what my arm does -- I can only give it vague directions and hope it ends up more or less where I want it to, then shift gears and take my time to get it to where I want it to go.
[+] [-] devsatish|14 years ago|reply
Bought Logitech/Microsoft/Cheap store brands, none of them gives a smooth mouse movement on OSX. It feels like someone's holding ur hand while using the mouse.
[+] [-] jamesrom|14 years ago|reply
I have tried a few different mouse acceleration fixes/apps but still can't get it to feel right. This article explains why nothing I've tried works well.
[+] [-] chris_dcosta|14 years ago|reply
I found that all optical mice suffer from a kind of blindness when faced with surfaces that do not have sufficient contrast and crucially sufficient variety in the pattern.
It's as if the mouse thinks it's still looking at the same spot if its moved on a surface like this, hence the delayed reaction or lag.
I searched far and wide for a suitable surface and I found a picture of pebbles on a beach worked best as long as the surface of the picture is also matt and not glossy.
I know it's not a tech solution...
[+] [-] Gravityloss|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zyb09|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bodyfour|14 years ago|reply
I switched to a Steelseries Xai, and I've been loving it. It doesn't have any special mac drivers but all of the fancy settings are controllable via a little LCD screen on the bottom of the mouse.
I'm not sure if its affected by this "32 ms" problem. I only use OS/X so I might just be used to it at this point.
[+] [-] Flow|14 years ago|reply
If I look at my mouse in the app "USB Prober" I see OS X uses a 2ms interrupt to poll the mouse. If I'm not completely off that's 500Hz. More than the 125Hz that seems to be default USB polling frequency.
[+] [-] rix0r|14 years ago|reply
Not sure what it changed though; I thought it was the acceleration curve but for all I know it could be replacing the entire OS X mouse driver, laggy code and all.
[+] [-] ovi256|14 years ago|reply
I've also had Windows friends complain about mouse lag on my OS X. I've always thought it was due to the different acceleration curves, but disabling OS X mouse acceleration never seemed to fix it.
[+] [-] Gring|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kapowaz|14 years ago|reply
I'd long believed that the problem would never be addressed, and then a couple of months ago I used a new Apple Magic Mouse with Lion; the acceleration and speed was so good out of the box that I didn't install USB Overdrive as part of my new Mac setup routine for the first time in over 5 years. Could it be that it's a driver issue, or just different devices have different acceleration characteristics? Perhaps, but whatever the case might be, I'm far less inclined to attribute it to input lag.
[+] [-] alextgordon|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|14 years ago|reply
Changing that option changed a lot. I loved it. But 10.7 is a bit better at managing it than it used to be, or it feels that way to me, so I don't mind as much as I did.
[+] [-] LachlanArthur|14 years ago|reply
http://lach.la/n/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Cursor.png