After the next vsync, the back buffer is drawn. A new frame is drawn onto the back buffer, with the new mouse position. You move the mouse just after this is done. Here’s what I think is happening in the worst case:ġ.
OSX SMOOTHMOUSE MAC OS X
I’m assuming Mac OS X uses double buffering for graphics. Observation: when I quickly select text using the mouse, there is no lag between the mouse cursor and the selection of text.
OSX SMOOTHMOUSE WINDOWS
No, you can’t do anything about it other than switch to Windows or Linux.ģ2ms… that sounds like the time taken to display two screen frames at 60 Hz.Lag gives “floating” feeling which is often confused with acceleration.Yes, Mac OS X (any version) is less suited for gaming and design.I’ve also heard that they are supposedly working on a solution. The problem has been confirmed by an Apple engineer. The problem is as well closely related to the cursor jumping issue that has alone been fixed in Lion thanks to all our bug reports. You can supposedly avoid the issue by disabling QuartzExtreme. The problem is caused by a bug somewhere at the windowserver level of Mac OS X, and not by a mouse driver. It still exists in Snow Leopard and Lion. The problem I’m talking about affects all mouse and touchpads since at least Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. In ControllerMate, for instance, you can manually draw your own acceleration curve.īut it’s all pretty much useless as long as mouse movement is literally retarded, because it takes a lot of time for your brain to get used to it. The truth is, in Mac OS X you can change acceleration to whatever you want using many programs and techniques. I mentioned acceleration because a lot of people often confuse it with lag. The lag of a Mac OS X cursor is at least twice bigger than Windows’ cursor and yes, a human eye can surely notice that. * * * SmoothMouse, the long-awaited fix for mouse problems in OS X, has been released.įurther discussion about mouse lag continues on the SmoothMouse Forum.īy that I mean a delay between receiving movement data from the mouse device and rendering the on-screen cursor. If you told a person who averages 300 actions per minute in a gaming match that "32ms mouse lag doesn't matter" you would get laughed out of the room.Īnd yes, there are 2 separate issues in OS X:ġ) the mouse acceleration curve is different from Windows, I care about this but not anywhere near as much as I care aboutĢ) the mouse lag which SmoothMouse (which alas was quite buggy the last time I tried it) is trying to fixThe main problem of mouse movement in Mac OS X is not acceleration - it’s lag.
OSX SMOOTHMOUSE PROFESSIONAL
There are professional gamers out there who do things like practice the "opening game" (first 5-10 minutes) of a 1v1 Starcraft match of a specific playable race vs another specific playable race on a specific game map against specific strategy or strategies for DAYS and WEEKS if they feel this is a weak spot in their tournament play. But if you put 2 competitive gamers (I am talking actual "gaming practice", high-end leagues, etc) against each other playing at a very high level, tiniest details and differences escalate into something that has an enormous impact. When you are a casual gamer who fires up Civ maybe once a month, you probably don't care. This is actually a textbook example of what I was talking about above.
Still, the difference is there and makes a MASSIVE impact when you are gaming at a competitive enough level to notice and care. Same thing as people who don't care about their monitor responce time (say 4ms vs 16ms) or latency in online gaming (say 50ms vs 100ms in an FPS game).
Obviously there are plenty of people who game on their Macs and don't know any better as well as people who game on both OS X and Windows and don't see/feel any difference. Since Apple was hell-bent on having some UI things related to mouse movement render on the screen in 100% perfection, they had to make tradeoffs, resulting in what is essentially minor mouse lag (I don't remember how much, but I think it was in the ballpark of 16-20ms compared to Windows 7). When gaming and particularly when playing competitive FPS and RTS games, MacOS X is basically unusable. When browsing the web or working on text processing or whatever, I couldn't care less.
People use computers for different things.
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