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 pulling 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 keslo camera for our recent collaboration with gav from
slo-mo guys and we figured what the hey
we've already got it we might as well use it oh that's hot
speaking of hot this segway to our sponsor for today's video story blocks
video storyblocks 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 lag or mouse
latency is dictated by the total delay that we feel between moving our hand 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 rig here we're running competitive
shooter cs go on this corsair vengeance
gaming rig with a core i7 8700 and geforce rtx 2080 we've paired this with
one of the fastest gaming monitors around this 1080p 240hz 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 uh more creative
meet norm so named for its two not 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 going to keep things simple we're going
to take one of logitech's high performance wired mice so this is their
new generation mx518 with their hero sensor and we're going to put it head to
head against one of their high performance wireless mice in this case
the g703 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 run mx518
fantastic wow that's a really short delay
our first run with the mx-518 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 in 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 g703 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 looked
a bit faster but i 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 set up anyway we figured why not
investigate some other manufacturer's mice so we're gonna start with corsair's
dark core rgb se
we chose this one because it's corsair's sort of equivalent sub one millisecond
latency mouse and we wanted to know how their claims stack up
corsair's dark core 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 set to a thousand hertz pulling
rate so the final mouse ultra light 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 going to 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 full of
but okay tell you what i will i will guess this one is 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
corsair's wireless appears at least within the margin of error of our test
to be on par with logitechs 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 1000hz
pulling 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 240hz 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 pulling
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 segway for a long time this video is brought to you by
storyblocks you can get studio quality stock video clips for a fraction of the
cost with storyblocks video you can download all the stock video your heart
desires from their member library including hd and 4k footage after
effects templates motion backgrounds and more and all the content is royalty free
so you can use it for commercial projects like youtube videos if your us
or personal projects like youtube videos if you're us
new clips are added regularly so there's always something fresh to download so
check them out today at the link in the video description
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
button but if you liked it because you love science hit like get subscribed or
maybe consider checking out where to buy some of the stuff we featured at the
link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool
shirts like the one i'm wearing and our community forum which is totally worth a
join by the way i'm sorry the audio was so bad in these videos guys we're just
we're in the science warehouse and it doesn't have
it's not coated so