https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdevelo ... worldwide/May 24, 2023—Windows configuration update
Windows 11 version 22H2, all editions
This update improves your computer’s performance when you use a mouse that has a high report rate for gaming. To learn more, see “Reduced game stutter with high report rate mice” in Delivering Delightful Performance for More Than One Billion Users Worldwide.
BeforeReduced game stutter with high report rate mice
We know gamers hate stutter, and we’re fixing issues throughout Windows so that an untimely frame-freeze won’t take gamers out of their immersive experiences. Gamers love to push their systems to the limit in search of the best experiences in-game. Many also use sensitive, high DPI, high report rate mice to shave milliseconds off their response times and increase precision. At the same time, the world of gaming is more connected than ever with gamers relying on an increasing number of background apps while playing, like voice chat, streaming, apps for configuring your keyboard, mouse, or graphics card, and more. The Windows input stack was being pushed to its limits with high report rate mice and their input being delivered to not just the game, but also multiple background processes. In turn, that caused a significant amount of time processing input rather than providing as many cycles as possible for rendering the game experience.
We set out to reduce the amount of processing time it took to handle input requests by throttling and coalescing background raw mouse listeners and capping their message rate. Prior to these changes, we observed on a Surface Laptop Studio with a 1000 Hz mouse, a test bed of background listeners, and popular games that there was significant stutter. After the improvements, on the same setup, we now deliver a smooth, uninterrupted gaming experience and preserve the low latency, high precision input experience in games while being efficient with input for background listeners!
After
Microsoft Engineer explaining what has changed
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comm ... ame=iossmfHi folks, Microsoft engineer here! I posted back in July 2021 asking about people experiencing FPS drops in games when using high report-rate mice. I got a ton of feedback both in that post and via DMs, and now, I have a new ask - can you test out our improvements? They've officially reached Windows Insider build 25272:
Made a change to help improve performance when using a high report rate mouse while gaming.
By far, the biggest issue we saw in the traces we examined was a high number of background subscribers to mouse raw input. Every time a mouse input message was generated, we'd also have to deliver these raw input messages to all the subscribers, and all of that simultaneous activity across the recipient processes could cause the game itself to be slower in processing the input (taking away time spent rendering frames).
Pushed to an extreme, we could see a game taking longer to process the input than it took for new input to be delivered to it (since high report mice produce input so quickly). This could cause the game to get stuck in a loop of input processing, desperately trying to drain the input queue, all the while starving out its rendering.
We made two major changes to help this scenario:
We reduced or removed lock acquisitions from some APIs frequently called in this code path, allowing simultaneous recipients to make better forward progress without getting in each other's way.
We capped the rate at which background recipients of raw mouse input could receive messages, so e.g. instead of seeing 1000 messages per second for a 1000Hz mouse, it may only see 125 (but each containing the combined payload of the coalesced messages).
As part of testing, I made a stress-test setup on a laptop and tried out League of Legends - here's the before and after. The results are promising, but I'd love more real-world validation now that the changes are live! We're especially interested in understanding if the reduction of message generation to background subscribers results in any compatibility issues in applications - e.g. you could have some utility that reports your mouse FPS, and it may only say 125Hz instead of 1000Hz.
Please try it out if you can, and let me know how it goes.
The MouseMovement Recorder bundled with the MarkC mouse fix only reports 125Hz now, but MouseTester_v1.5.3 shows the full 8000Hz polling rate, so it looks like my system has the update and it's working as intended. I tested some games that were problematic at 8000Hz and I no longer have FPS drops or stuttering in them.
This polling rate update and the support for 500+Hz displays in Windows 11 makes the upgrade worth it for competitive gaming. I haven't seen any information that suggests these updates will make it to Windows 10.
