Re: Long time lurker, Inconsistent, Annoying, On and Off mouse input lag. EXTREMELY close to quitting PC gaming ANY idea
Posted: 08 Jun 2022, 02:15
Man, I feel your pain I really do. I've been dealing with input lag related issues since 2016 and have been obsessed with finding the root of the cause or at least better understand what contributes to input lag and how to lessen its effects. It wasn't until recently that I found the final and last culprit causing my mouse to become floaty. Shortly after a windows install. I'm not going to go into everything all of the settings/tweaks I apply to my system because I've already done that on this forum.
Anyways, the only way I could get my system/games to run appropriately without input lag or any kind of desync was to reinstall windows, apply all of my settings in both bios and os, install driver's, chipset drivers etc. It would be solid for an hour, maybe a couple of days if I'm lucky but usually within an hour or two my mouse always became floaty and had that 'disconnected' feel. It drove me absolutely mad and my gameplay suffered significantly as a result. Gaming was no longer fun and I even contemplated quitting as well.
So I started using mouse tester so I could see polling graphs of when my mouse was behaving properly and when it started to become floaty. Needed to make sure it wasn't placebo and that I was possibly imagining things. Well I confirmed something definitely changed that caused my mouse polling to suddenly become an erratic mess. I tried to find on my system what changed so I looked at event log and device manager devices in the events tab to see if anything had been automatically installed recently. I found numerous keyboard devices that had been auto installed along with additional mouse drivers. Very bizarre. So I did some research and tried to find out if anyone else had experienced this and found this link https://www.overclock.net/threads/how-t ... ost-people.
This guide shows you how to clean install a mouse. You essentially have to disable the mouse and then delete greyed out entries in device manager for keyboard, HID and USB. Once you delete them all, you reboot and check the keyboard event log for when it was installed to confirm it worked. Check the link if interested. I think a guy on this forum who goes by the name slender posted his version of this mouse fix as well.
So yeah, this actually fucking worked, I honestly couldn't believe it. Gaming is great again and I'm performing at the level I know I should.... Turns out there's a Microsoft mouse/keyboard bug where your mouse/keyboard auto installs over what's already installed and completely destroys mouse movement. This can also be caused by switching out your mouse with another. Dead entries will exist that contribute to the problem. So everytime I boot, I check the keyboard event log in device manager to make sure nothing was installed without me knowing. If something is, I'll 'clean install my mouse' again and it's back to working like new. Hopefully Microsoft fixes this nonsense.
Also some other things that come to mind that can cause a floaty mouse worth double checking on your end... Disable Fullscreen optimizations on all of your game .exe files by going into properties and then compatibity. Not configuring you power plan properly. Enable ultimate performance and make sure USB selective suspend is DISABLED along w/ the pci power savings one. Make sure you don't have faulty drivers causing huge dpc latency spikes. Use latency monitor for this. Install all of your mobos chipset drivers. Use timer resolution and set it to .5ms and.keep it running while you game. And of course, check your thermals and make sure you're not getting throttled. You can also experiment with using 500hz instead of 1000hz for your mouse. I use 500hz because it's more stable. I hope some of this helps!
Anyways, the only way I could get my system/games to run appropriately without input lag or any kind of desync was to reinstall windows, apply all of my settings in both bios and os, install driver's, chipset drivers etc. It would be solid for an hour, maybe a couple of days if I'm lucky but usually within an hour or two my mouse always became floaty and had that 'disconnected' feel. It drove me absolutely mad and my gameplay suffered significantly as a result. Gaming was no longer fun and I even contemplated quitting as well.
So I started using mouse tester so I could see polling graphs of when my mouse was behaving properly and when it started to become floaty. Needed to make sure it wasn't placebo and that I was possibly imagining things. Well I confirmed something definitely changed that caused my mouse polling to suddenly become an erratic mess. I tried to find on my system what changed so I looked at event log and device manager devices in the events tab to see if anything had been automatically installed recently. I found numerous keyboard devices that had been auto installed along with additional mouse drivers. Very bizarre. So I did some research and tried to find out if anyone else had experienced this and found this link https://www.overclock.net/threads/how-t ... ost-people.
This guide shows you how to clean install a mouse. You essentially have to disable the mouse and then delete greyed out entries in device manager for keyboard, HID and USB. Once you delete them all, you reboot and check the keyboard event log for when it was installed to confirm it worked. Check the link if interested. I think a guy on this forum who goes by the name slender posted his version of this mouse fix as well.
So yeah, this actually fucking worked, I honestly couldn't believe it. Gaming is great again and I'm performing at the level I know I should.... Turns out there's a Microsoft mouse/keyboard bug where your mouse/keyboard auto installs over what's already installed and completely destroys mouse movement. This can also be caused by switching out your mouse with another. Dead entries will exist that contribute to the problem. So everytime I boot, I check the keyboard event log in device manager to make sure nothing was installed without me knowing. If something is, I'll 'clean install my mouse' again and it's back to working like new. Hopefully Microsoft fixes this nonsense.
Also some other things that come to mind that can cause a floaty mouse worth double checking on your end... Disable Fullscreen optimizations on all of your game .exe files by going into properties and then compatibity. Not configuring you power plan properly. Enable ultimate performance and make sure USB selective suspend is DISABLED along w/ the pci power savings one. Make sure you don't have faulty drivers causing huge dpc latency spikes. Use latency monitor for this. Install all of your mobos chipset drivers. Use timer resolution and set it to .5ms and.keep it running while you game. And of course, check your thermals and make sure you're not getting throttled. You can also experiment with using 500hz instead of 1000hz for your mouse. I use 500hz because it's more stable. I hope some of this helps!