Placebo or a possibility? USB ports and mouse feel.

[nuggify]

Personally I have observed this very behaivor but I have many more severe issues. The interesting thing for me is that if I re plug in my mice it provides different tracking behavior every time. It seems that it is skipping data points or something because of the EMI/Interference problems I have spoken about. I am not saying you have this exact issue but I am positive r0ach on OCN does as well as a decent number of others (there have been a few threads on this forum about it as well) so I would not rule it out. Pretty easy to confirm though, just wrap your cables in foil and see if that affects the cursor tracking (feel) like you say. It is extremely hard to quantify any of this without a high speed camera and like the Chief said an Arduino setup or the like. But despite that it is absolutely more than placebo- at least for me.

[TTT]

If this was the case would it also effect the mouse polling?

https://zowie.benq.com/ja/support/mouse ... ecker.html

Would it show big discrepencies on something like this?

[iceboy]

I had similar findings with USB keyboards - yeah I mainly play games with high frequency keyboards

I use the ASRock Z170 Gaming-ITX/ac mobo. Here's my experience:

1. The USB settings in BIOS does affect latency.

Legacy USB support:

• On - lag
• Auto - no lag, and keyboard works in both BIOS and grub boot menu
• UEFI only - no lag, keyboard works only in BIOS but not grub boot menu
• Off - no lag, keyboard not working in BIOS or grub boot menu

XHCI handoff:

• On - lag
• Off - no lag

2. Different ways of USB connection does affect latency.

Although battlenonsense claims that USB hubs do not affect latency. I can clearly feel the latency difference between different USB connections:

• USB 2.0 port (both red and black ones): best
• USB 2.0 port with USB 3.0 hub: medium - feels like average latency is ok but tail latency spiking
• USB 3.0 port: worst - similar "smoothing" effect as described in a post above

3. Drivers

The Windows 7 image patcher provided by ASRock comes with a older version (4.x) of the Intel USB 3.0 Driver. Updating the USB 3.0 driver to 5.x decreased a lot of the latency. Installing the Intel chipset driver also improves latency comparing to not installing. Latency decreased after installing the drivers and the previous BIOS setting and USB connection latency difference is less visible at this point.

4. Reconnect effects

I also noticed similar reconnect effects in a post above. This not only works with keyboards but also works with monitors and USB audio and are quite reproducible. My every day startup sequence is:

1. Reimage Windows 7 in Linux using ntfsclone
2. Some detached settings
3. Start the game
4. Reconnect USB audio
5. Restart monitor
6. Reconnect keyboard

It feels like reconnecting the devices kind of syncs them with the game. With this sequence I kind of eventually get stable gameplay and starting forget about the details.

[Chief Blur Buster]

Confirmed possibility.

Sometimes it is placebo but it definitely has happened to a lot of us.

Congested USB motherboard ports can fuzz high poll rates. All those adjacent ports can share USB traffic/interrupts/PCIe lanes with each other.

I saw graphs with 1KHz mouse fuzzed to a 20/1000sec variance (20 poll samples off-timing!!!), but was fully fixed by an external PCIe card.

In short -- try buying a PCIe USB card, to get a dedicated USB chip just only for your high-Hz mouse -- with a dedicated PCIe lane to your CPU. It really reduces jitter/contention a lot on a motherboards with lots of USB devices plugged into it.

Connection sequence and port roulette can affect contention/prioritization of many USB devices, so in theory the jitter can improve/worsen.

For high-Hz devices, in lag/smoothness/jitter critical situations, plug 1 USB device per PCIe card for best 1000Hz-8000Hz performance. It's like a dedicated carpool lane just for your high-Hz mouse, on an otherwise busy freeway with motherboard USB ports contending with lots of USB traffic. Even many devices built into your computer (Bluetooth controllers, memory card drives, etc) may be sharing the USB hub that runs your motherboard ports. It can be hard to play USB port roulette to find your best USB port. Forget the casino, buy a guaranteed-dedicated USB port for your mouse that's on a completely clear PCIe lane straight to your CPU. You lose a PCI slot, and some PCIe lanes, but at least nothing is sharing with your high-Hz device -- but this can be worth the price of admission to a pretty silky high-Hz mouse.

There are other causes, but this is far more common than many of us expected.

So options:
1. Play USB port roulette
2. Bypass the roulette and add a USB PCIe card to guarantee dedicated USB processing just only for your mosue.

TIP: Always put high-Hz keyboard and high-Hz mouse on SEPARATE DEDICATED USB CHIPS.

Crossposting here.

Houston, we have a problem.

Especially with 4000 Hz keyboards and 8000 Hz mice being used simultaneously.

I just helped someone solve a high-Hz USB performance interference problem between two high-Hz USB devices:

Problem: High-Hz poll performance interference between 1000 Hz keyboard + 1000 Hz mouse

While I'm pretty convinced that 8k hz mouse polling is going to be not only noticeable but also impactful , I'm starting to wonder how much keyboard polling will affect this. High keyboard polling has known to destabilize the mouse polling and vice versa.


For example this is a 1khz mouse polling on an optimized setup with a 125hz keyboard. As you can see the variance is quite little, barely 1hz.


This is the same mouse but the keyboard is wooting one set to 1k hz. All of a sudden the variance is 20hz. Looks like windows can't even fully handle 1k hz keyboard and mouse at the same time.

With keyboards now supporting 4k hz polling like the Corsair K100, I'm curious how will this affect the stability of 8k hz mouse polling. Seeing that a 1k hz keyboard is enough to destabilize a mouse set to just 1k hz, a 4k hz keyboard would probably trash the stability of a 8k hz mouse.

Solution: Serparate USB controllers and PCI bus lanes per 1 high-pollrate device

Small update, using the asmedia port for keyboard (the lowest one, right next to the usb-c port) while using top port for mouse seems to minimize if not remove the impact of high keyboard polling on the mouse polls.



Blue is the mouse and red is the keyboard. This combo provided the best polling, pic of polling attached below.

Yeah, that was what I thought. Glad my recommendation helped!

With ultrahigh poll rates, you really need to isolate to one USB chip (and/or separate bus lanes) per high-pollrate device.

PCI-Express USB cards are also another solution that can help this. Plug the keyboard into the motherboard USB, and plug the mouse into the PCI-Express USB. Or do do USB port roulette until you find jackpot. Keep the adjacent ports empty (port above/below a plugged-in high-Hz USB device) because they often share the same USB controller.

This would probably become a staple recommendation of the new 2020s-era "Blur Busters Mouse Guide II"

Until the motherboard manufacturers "keeps up with the Joneses" and have a dedicated-USB-chip keyboard port, and a dedicated-USB-chip mouse port for the 2020-2030s esports era of 4000 Hz keyboard + 8000 Hz mouse + >360 Hz monitors + RTX 3080+ framerates.

This Grand gaming computer upgrade supercycle is going to be very interesting. I rarely see so many concurrent upgrades happen. Those now seem to happen only once every 5-10 years, rather than every 2-3 years in the 1990s-2000s. We are seeing a major Vicious Cycle Effect tick-tock (multiple concurrent frequency upgrades).

[iceboy]

My mobo has a ASMedia USB 3.1 port which should be similar to a PCIe USB card. I tried to connect keyboard to that port and it's worse than the port from Intel chipset. So at least a random card may not help - we need cards that are proven to be good, as requested in this post. And because of the placebo it's best to be USB 2.0 cards. I also feel that it's more related to driver/bios/os interaction and less related to USB bus congestion.

[mago]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNrZCigWu_4

disabling USB legacy XHCI HandOff after flash the bios
made same improvement