Changing mouse settings improved my game fps

[porina]

As a bit of history on this one, I was tinkering with my system for other reasons last weekend, and since then it felt a bit off. I changed so many things I couldn't simply undo it all. Now, I'm not sure I fixed everything, but I came up with interesting observations. Key parts of system for gaming are 8086k stock, 1080Ti factory OC, 1440p 144Hz G-sync monitor. My main timesink game is FFXIV, so that's all I tested with. I was finding, in some situations, the game became much more laggy than it used to. fps tanked.

 

After much experimentation, I found moving the mouse quickly would drop the fps to half or less normal. In one test spot, it typically was around 80fps if I left it alone. Moving the mouse quickly, it would drop to 40. It's a Logitech G403 "gaming" mouse so I downloaded the software for it. Changing the polling rate seemed to have fixed that specific observation. It was set to 1000 times a second. Reducing it to 250, I get maybe 5fps drop at most now. Lowering it further to 125 didn't seem to help further.

 

I'm guessing, with lots of fast mouse movement, the USB was sending so many commands to the system/game it was consuming resources and taking them away from the game. It doesn't explain everything, as mouse settings were not touched during the tinkering last weekend.

 

It makes me wonder now, if this applies to other games also. Or is it specific to how FFXIV handles it? Might this apply to the keyboard too? 

[Dufsao14]

Mouse Polling rate is like your monitor refresh rate, the higher it is, the more times it updates the movement/image

 

Having it lower means you PC works less to update the mouse position, having anything over 250 is generally aimed at professional eSports and such, for home gaming and minor competition, 250 Hz polling rate should be fine

 

As a conclusive comment, the polling rate affects your system as the mouse is trying to update at 1000~ times per second @ 1000mhz polling rate

the lower the polling rate, the less cpu resource is needed for the mouse

[porina]

Just now, Dufsao14 said:

As a conclusive comment, the polling rate affects your system as the mouse is trying to update at 1000~ times per second @ 1000mhz polling rate

the lower the polling rate, the less cpu resource is needed for the mouse

That's what I said I do wonder why I'm only just noticing an impact now though if I hadn't previously. Something else might be taking more resource, so the extra load from this may become significant. Time to buy an 8 core...

[r2724r16]

16 minutes ago, porina said:

That's what I said I do wonder why I'm only just noticing an impact now though if I hadn't previously. Something else might be taking more resource, so the extra load from this may become significant. Time to buy an 8 core...

What I'm saying is most likely wrong, but maybe using a PS2 mouse will also gain you some performance compared to a USB mouse due to how each of the interfaces work.