Smoother as in "less stuttery". I could always see the cursor get "stuck" for just a millisecond, probably only 1 frame on the 360Hz panel. It's extremely subtle. I've always noticed this but thought it was just like that. I had a few friends, who're also pretty good at games, come to my house and play on my setup over the last years, and while all of them noticed that something was off when they played here, nobody noticed the "stuttery" mouse cursor on the desktop. I was assuming because they had it too, but I think they just simply didn't notice it. Again, it's extremely subtle but I'm also extremely sensitive to this kind of stuff. It's all gone now. It "feels" the exact same though, and unlike other people have experienced it's not speeding up or slowing down at all.
Are you really sure this would make sense? Think about it from a wider angle: Let's do some really rough math that's likely orders of magnitude off, but nevertheless, let's at least try. Let's set an arbitrary cutoff from "professional" Counter-Strike at the top 100 mark. This would incorporate tier 1 and tier 2 players. Let's consider every player that's in a team inside the top 100 of the world as a professional player that plays the game for money (as a profession). That would equate 500 professional players in tier 1 and tier 2 of Counter-Strike alone. Let's look at just a few FPS games which are played for prize money as I write this post: CS2, Rainbow 6, Apex Legends, CoD, Overwatch, PUBG, Valorant, Fortnite, Halo. These are only 9, there are probably more. Another game to consider is Rocket League, not a FPS but it is also heavily affected by input lag ("heavy car bug"). These are 10 games I've gotten off the top of my head. Let's say the cutoff for all these games is also similar to Counter-Strike, giving each team about 500 professional players which play for money. That would give you about 5000 professional players who play competitive video games right now, as we speak, while getting paid to do so, for at least 8 hours a day, often more, and also on stages for prize money. You don't believe them either?
Here's the thing: I'm extremely sensitive to any kind of lag. If I say I am, that's because I am and I've experienced this a lot in my life. If you however still don't want to take my word for it, think again. There's always a bigger fish in the pond. Out of all these 5000 professional players, mind you again that they're getting paid to play video games 8 hours a day, don't you think there would be at least one, just ONE singular professional player who would be even more sensitive to input lag than I am? If even just one player with this kind of perception would exist, he would notice that he can't play games on any Windows install apart from Windows 7, no? However, I've never seen a professional player request to play on a Windows 7 install in CS, Rocket League, PUBG or Valorant (The games I follow regularly).
You'd think that a professional player playing video games for 8 hours a day would notice when his game feels off. However you never see players complaining about "input lag on Windows 10" or something. Because it simply doesn't happen and Windows 10 doesn't come with "integrated" input lag.
Some of these professional players play the game on stages or on LAN events on other computers than their own. Wouldn't it be pretty noticeable for a trained professional when they leave their own setup at home to play on a tournament computer and the mouse felt completely different due to different input lag, either more or less? If these professional players actually did change something on their own setup that would "fix" the software side of the lag, and then they would travel to LAN, how would they cope with the difference in input lag? What about players who perform better on LAN than online?
One thing I can tell you for absolute certain is that tournament organizers do not optimize anything within the Windows registry or anything else like that. They either rent or lease prebuilt computers from either SI's or OEM's and use them as-is. If a TO does a lot, they boot every computer into BIOS and enable XMP. That's it. They mostly use PXE servers to install the OS'es, which is either Windows 10 or Windows 11. No tweaks whatsoever. It's also not like players can just enter the Windows registry and start changing settings to their heart's content. Everything on these computers is locked down, controlled and monitored, and if any player wanted to access the registry, it would trigger alarms at the admin panel really fast. All players are allowed to do is change settings in the Nvidia control panel and some of the settings in the Windows built-in settings app.
Then there's of course tens of thousands, if not millions of players out there who play on bog-standard Windows installations without ever modifying anything at all, and they don't have problems whatsoever. There's a reason so little people know about this issue in the first place and why this forum isn't overflowing with thousands of posts and threads created daily. Your statement just doesn't make sense if you think it through.
Sure, there might be problems with Windows if you've fiddled with the settings too much and changed something that maybe should not have been changed, but a regular, unchanged install won't be responsible for problems, period. If this was true, every player in the world who's gaming on Windows would have these problems. It's not making an exception just for you or something.
Careful with what you insinuate.
Exactly. In my opinion it's clear that there are multiple problems which somehow manifest themselves in the same manner for everybody. The effects are input lag, desync, bad hitreg, overall bad, slow feel to a computer. Whatever might trigger these symptoms we're yet to understand, but it's clear as day that one person's workaround does nothing for a different person, implying that there are different causes. Blanket claiming that Windows is to blame isn't productive and doesn't contribute anything to the discussion.
