Mouse polling rate causing major FPS drops

[brutchev]

Hello,

I just bought a new computer and I came into a very strange problem. Playing certain games(battlefield 1 and gta5 so far), I get a ton of lag when I move the mouse. If I move the mouse in circles it will just lag and drop from 100fps down to less than 30.

It took a long time to figure out why, I thought it was my CPU for a while. I found a cheap tiny laptop mouse and plugged it in: lag was gone.

So after trying many mouse options I turned down polling rate from 1000 to 250 and the lag is fixed.

Why is this happening? Is there a fix to this? Do you see any drawbacks to using 250 polling rate instead of 1000 for gaming?


My mouse is the Logitech g502 and my CPU is I7-6700k. If you need any more specs let me know!

Thanks!!

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

Polling is how often it checks the mouse position to see if the mouse has moved. Higher polling costs CPU cycles, so for CPU intensive games it can make a difference. Battlefield 1 is pretty notoriously CPU heavy, as is GTA 5. 1000 for that mouse means it's checking 1000 times per second, or every 1 millisecond. A setting of 250 is 250 times per second, or 4 milliseconds. A difference of 3 ms may or may not be noticeable to you depending on your reflexes and your monitor response time, but if it's causing lag then that's far worse anyway. And you can always try increasing your polling rate until you find the point it starts to lag.

Oh, and a crowded USB controller can also play a role with high polling rate devices, as they compete for bandwidth/cycles.