Manufacturers have been bragging about the improved latency of their wireless mice for ages. But how good are wireless gaming mice compared to their wired counterparts?
As it turns out, pretty bloody good. There was already a lot of anecdotal evidence — mostly in the “this is good enough that I can’t tell the difference” form — but someone has finally gotten a hold of some equipment to run some quantitative tests.
Linus Tech Tips rented a Phantom Flex4K high speed camera, which records at 1000 frames per second. Understandably, not everyone has one of those lying around (or the means to rent one).
But it’s not enough to just point a camera at a screen and hit record. You need to also have a measurable way of accurately measuring the moment the mouse starts moving. So the team also rigged up a couple of OR gates with a hammer, and with some conductive tape applied to the hammer and the base of the mice, making the test more reliable (although Premiere Pro’s difference mode is just as effective, they found).
It’s still not possible to actually intercept the signal from the mouse to the cord, so manufacturer claims of sub-1ms transmission speeds couldn’t be tested. But each of the wireless mice tested — Logitech’s G703 and the Corsair Dark Core RGB SE — were just as responsive as the wired MX518 (the re-released version) and the Finalmouse Ultralight Sunset.
Just as interesting was the performance of the Ultralight Sunset, a mouse which only runs at 500Hz compared to 1000Hz for most other mice. The difference in responsiveness was so small that even the best gaming monitors — which are only capable of displaying 240Hz at most — couldn’t display the difference.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/07/logitech-g502-lightspeed-wireless-gaming-mice-review-big-daddy-is-here/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/07/DSC2930-410×231.jpg” title=”The Big Daddy Of Wireless Mice Is Here” excerpt=”There’s a couple of trends among gaming mice in the last couple of years: lighter and, if possible, wireless. But while gamers are generally clamouring for more both of those things, there’s always been an outlier in the market: the gargantuan, almost monolithic G502.”]
But the real winner here, in my eyes, is Corsair. Their wireless tech was a couple of milliseconds behind Logitech in the tests, but the performance was just as good as a gaming-centric wired mouse, which is what you want. And if companies like Corsair have got their wireless tech downpat, it shouldn’t be long before competition in the wireless gaming mice market heats up — which brings prices down for gamers like you and me.
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