32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling.
Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, maybe even using some form of inverse kinematics, so that when you move your hand towards a small button aiming is smoothly assisted, and/or click target is helpfully adjusted in size to enhance Fitt's law compliance (like iOS keyboard keys dynamically changing sizes depending on the sequence of letters, hence words you type)
Of course this bites hard outside of this environment. It seems Mac OS X needs an API to provide some form of raw value access to the pointer so that arbitrary software (notably games) can conduct its own analysis.
Anecdotally, my personal experience has been that it never bothered me, neither in games (FPS and RTS) nor in WIMP.
IMO a more likely answer: 32ms / 2 = 16ms, the typical frame time for a monitor running at 60 Hz. Also the post noted disabling QuartzExtreme (GPU accelerated rendering) fixed the issue. I suppose the mouse cursor is drawn with GPU acceleration. Then, to optimise rendering, the window system uses double buffering (a common technique) - however, double-buffering has the well-known side-effect of introducing a one frame delay. So it would take 16ms to see your mouse cursor update, but with double buffering it takes 32ms.
I think Windows uses a special graphics card feature (an "overlay" IIRC) to update the mouse cursor independently of the double buffered window system. I noticed moving windows became ever so slightly more laggy going from XP to Vista - probably because the window system became GPU accelerated.
When working on drivers for capacitive touchscreens (of which trackpads are a pretty close sibling), we put all kinds of IIR filtering in there to smooth out the cursor and usually a variance filter to take away noise. Since those filters (esp. IIR) rely on data from previous scans, they naturally introduce a delay into the chain.
Usually this is all on the sensing side and not the host side. Perhaps there's some trackpad filtering that's being applied to the mouse when it didn't need to be?
Indeed there exist this low-level filtering, but what I suppose is at a higher level. Say you have a button in the top left quadrant and your mouse around the bottom right corner. Now you move the mouse to point over the button. In doing so your initial move is quite ample towards the button. From speed and direction the OS could infer that you want to reach the button and ever so slightly steer your move towards it. This would be reevaluated at each 'step' across the move, giving a smooth, spline-like movement, and as you get closer to the button, its virtual size would grow ever so slightly, so that if you rush to the click and undershoot or overshoot it by a few pixels, the click still get registered. Even when there's nothing of interest on screen this system would still be registering samples, but doing NOOP, hence the preservation of the delay in a game situation.
Such a scenario would be impossible to do so close to the hardware as it would have no knowledge of the GUI. I have not even the foggiest idea if OSX does something even close to that but hey, you'll never know. It could just as well be some eager host-side smoothing to accommodate for vintage or unknown mice.
I'm a little surprised that mouse state is something that a modern OS would be sampling (as opposed to, say, getting events 'pushed' by the device up through the driver). Or is this one of those "all event systems are really sampling once you look deep enough" things?
USB is a polled system. Doesn't mean you can't "push" data through it with some kind of supersampling, but you need to hit a rendezvous with the host controller.
32ms is FOREVER for game input. That's two whole frames of a 60hz game.
Mice don't send a continuous stream of information to the computer. Instead, they send samples at some rate. It's that rate that lloeki is referring to.
So the mouse itself is polling/sending at a particular rate? It sounded to me from the article (and the above commenter) like the host machine was doing the polling.
I was recently using an algorithm for determining control points for a bezier curve. You need 4 total points to accurately determine the curve, maybe there is a similar curve that apple is solving for?
Longtime Mac user here... for what it's worth, I don't know what the OP is referring to. I use both Mac and Windows regularly (home vs work), and I don't see a noticeable difference. Maybe I've just gotten used to it. Definitely isn't a problem for me.
Windows and Linux (Ubuntu Gnome or whatnot) have a much much much more responsive mouse input for me than Mac OS X. Maybe some people don't notice this, but for those who do, it's very annoying. It's inconceivable to me how somebody doesn't notice it, especially if OS X is supposed to be for graphic designers who use the mouse a lot. Maybe they all have Wacom or some such tablets.
It's much harder to hit any buttons because you can't just speedily mouse over it, you have to use visual feedback to inch on it. And it causes much more stress and strain on your hand, wrist, elbow, eyes and everything. No matter what mouse hardware you are using. The same mice work very well in Windows and Ubuntu. The OS X drivers just suck. I've tried USB overdrive, mouse settings and everything. The basic lag just doesn't go away.
Too bad some keyboard shortcuts like for scrolling work really bad in OSX too - the cursor stays in one place when going up or down pages meaning you have to use the mouse.
The cursor jumping is another crazy issue indeed. You never know where it is going to be once you go over a certain speed threshold.
(Writing this from OS X. Otherwise it's quite nice.)
Caveat: I used to play Quake where the difference between 60 and 77 FPS is life and death. Everybody used high rate CRT:s and clocked their mice to 500 Hz or so. Here's a real mouse test: http://www.esreality.com/?a=post&id=1265679 . I'm annoyed at the mushy interfaces that electronics could have gotten rid of decades ago. It's somehow just a less stressful situation to take photos or browse them in a camera with less delay for example.
Counterpoint: the Windows mouse acceleration is terrible. Messing with the cursor speed doesn't help, it's impossible not to end up with jumpy moves and constantly overshoot buttons and menu options (doubly so menu options since the single convenient always-at-the-top-of-your-screen menubar isn't present).
If you grew up with one system, the other is horribly broken and I'd argue nearly impossible to learn. I'm a graphic designer who used Windows for years at work without ever "getting used to it", even if I never came home and touched my Mac. Now I work full time at home and it's heaven to have a mouse/cursor that does what I want it to do.
Strangely on some installations it doesn't seem to come into effect. For example, I have never noticed it on a MacBook using the touchpad. And I could have sworn it was not there when I first installed Snow Leopard.
But right after installing Lion I had to spend the first few hours hunting down utilities to get the mouse back into a usable state...
That is, until I installed Team Fortress 2 for office LAN party. Having played it on Windows, it was a world of difference - OS X version seemed so inaccurate, even after getting rid of acceleration.
When you're playing a game like that you become highly attuned to the characteristics of your input device.
I find the same thing happens when playing console games and the "look" stick acceleration curves are completely different between games. It is disorienting until you get your bearings and adjust to the speed and acceleration of each input system.
Just as switching between Windows and OS X means switching from CTRL to CMD, you kind of have to go with the flow on mouse speed, acceleration, and so on.
I play TF2 almost hours every day and I'm often in the top 5 players in the server when I play sniper or soldier.
I play in Mac OS X and I use a Razer Deathadder 3G Spawn. No extra drivers.
However, I tried wiggling the mouse pointer and I can't see a lag on my iMac, but if I grab a Finder-window and wiggle it left-right very fast I think there's actually some lag.
I can't really compare TF2 to Windows since in Windows I use the Razer drivers. But yeah, the mouse in TF2 in Windows feels a bit more "glued on".
Edit: Just tried the Explorer-wiggling in Windows and it too felt a bit laggy.
I really wonder if the "input lag" problem is as simple as a design difference. For instance, if on Windows the mouse position is polled immediately prior to rendering the screen but on OS X it's polled immediately after you would get a different feel.
That would introduce about 8ms of "lag" if you're really dialled in and able to perceive it.
This is part of the problem, I think. If enough people noticed it, it would have been fixed a long time ago. It's probably similar to how some people don't notice the rainbow effect on DLP projectors, and others do.
I had the same reaction. Then I realized that I've never used my Mac for high performance gaming of any kind. As a longtime Mac user (since 1984!), it just seems wrong to play games on a Mac.
I'm glad someone posted about this mouse problem. It is the most annoying thing that prevented me from switching to a mac for a long time. I was telling my friends that the mouse was not behaving the same way in Mac Os X and Windows. They were all saying that I was imagining it. I switched to Mac a year ago and got use to it, but I can still feel a difference.
I used a Mac and a PC at work side by side (Often working on the mac when the PC was waking, booting or installing some security upgrades which was a big part of the week, Vista wasn't really any good). But in mousing the difference was clear, Windows had the advantage. I tried switching the mice back and forth but no help.
I also had Ubuntu at home and at my parents' place, and it had the same simple responsive mouse as Vista.
Now I've gone full Mac but it still constantly annoys me at work. If it weren't for the other good things in the OS...
I notice the lag on my Mac. It feels like the mouse is stuck in mud compared to using the mouse on the Windows. When I first got my Macbook about 3 years ago, I tried like 6 or 7 different mouse and acceleration software, and they all acted the same. The trackpad works fine though.
Do you use a mouse? I've never been able to notice it with a trackpad (because trackpads are inherently less precise anyway, and seldom used for gaming). It has been painfully noticeable on both Macbook Pros I've owned (one circa Tiger, the other circa Lion).
I was thinking the same thing. I've tried the Magic Mouse, Logitech Anywhere, and Logitech Marathon all to no avail. I returned them all eventually and now I'm back to the trackpad.
Just from anecdotal evidence from someone who can detect the lag with 3 different mice, it's not there with the trackpad.
Honestly, I'm not convinced that lag is the problem more so than acceleration. I've never been able to disable acceleration since Tiger, so I don't have that information. Since it's quite reasonable to have acceleration with a trackpad, I've never had any problem with Mac trackpads.
Personally, I use a mouse all the time, I'm not a fan of trackpads. I'm not much of a gamer, though, which may explain why I haven't noticed the 1/30th of a second lag.
Same here, only Mac though. I don't game and haven't noticed this "lag". I currently have a MacBook Pro, and an iMac with a Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. Don't see it anywhere.
Newish Mac user here. The "feel" of mouse cursor movement is one of the few areas were Windows is superior. Years ago something like this was a big issue in Linux/X.org aswell but recently it has been fixed, atleast it feels like it for me.
I have noticed this "lag" with my magic mouse. Until now I have assumed there is something wrong with the hardware in it. Or that the bluetooth connection was breaking up. When I use the build in trackpad I have never noticed any lag.
Since Apple normally pay attention to details like this, im suprised that they have ignored this issue for so long.
If you use it for a while you might become blind to it?
I don't mind the mouse lag in normal use, but it's very annoying in FPS games. I've actually spent a day or two tweaking OS X mouse acceleration curves and whatever settings I could find. At the desktop I could get more "windows-y" feel, but always when I tried new settings TF2 the feeling was still wrong.
The lag author described is a plausible cause for my experiences.
Yes! This was my biggest gripe when switching from Windows - the mouse 'feel' is, well, wrong. I played around with the mouse settings, downloaded software to change the acceleration curve - nothing worked!
I'm now used to the mouse behaviour on OS X, but every time I have to switch back to Windows to do some testing I realise what I'm missing.
The mouse is such a crucial part of the experience it's odd that Apple haven't gotten it right.
The differing mouse "feel" that you're describing is most likely a result of the different mouse acceleration curve that OS X uses. (Mentioned in the article) I've noticed this too but I was able to resolve it by changing the mouse acceleration curve using this tool: http://triq.net/articles/mouse-acceleration-preference-pane-... Now I think it feels just as nice as Windows.
I expected to open this thread and see a bunch of "I've been using Macs for a long time and I've never seen a problem," and I was not disappointed.
Most people are not sensitive to minute changes in the way a mouse moves and feels. I've been a long, long time Windows user, and I absolutely love the way the mouse feels on a Windows system. I used to be a gamer as well, so I appreciate precise input, which is why I prefer high-resolution wired mice over wireless ones.
There is definitely a lag in OS X, and it drives me absolutely crazy. I started using OS X when Tiger came out, and I haven't seen any improvement through Snow Leopard (haven't used Lion yet). I mis-click on stuff all the time and it breaks my concentration having to focus so hard on the mouse. I am definitely willing to pay for a fix!
I should also note I tried USB Overdrive and another utility (name escapes me atm), but to no avail. Also, like many other people here, the touchpad is absolutely fantastic, I only see the issue with connected mice. This is probably due to the fact that I don't do graphics or precise movements with the touchpad, so it's much much more tolerable.
Am I the only person that loves the mouse/trackpad feel in OS X? Maybe it's because I've gotten too used to it, but I find it somewhat annoying to switch to Win or Ubuntu because of the different feel they have. I was using Ubuntu for about 6 months last year and never quite got used to how jumpy it felt (and yes, I did play with the mouse settings).
Apple has the worlds most terrible mouse product designs, but if there is one thing they got right it was the touchpads. I will not be purchasing a Windows laptop until I can get one with the exact same touchpad with the exact same surface and feeling to it. I've spent countless hours with my Mac and just the touchpad, I wouldn't even dream of doing the same with my Lenovo IdeaPad or any other laptop I have played with to date.
I love to criticize my Mac, but this is one of the areas that I've never found fault - the mouse and trackpad controls are flawless.
Recently I've had to use a Windows laptop (Lenovo) for work and I've yet to find a suitable external mouse - the track (pad|point) on the laptop is over-responsive, and both Microsoft and Logitech drivers are buggy in their application.
Finally (and this is only on my recent laptop) the external mouse and keyboard take ages to "wake up" - and they're USB (the bluetooth ones sometimes require me to go to device properties in order to become visible)! On my Mac, external inputs respond immediately once plugged in, and even bluetooth is almost seamless.
Played Starcraft/SC2 at a fairly decent level. To an RTS player the lag is extremely maddening as every mouse movement seems a bit off. (to get a good feel for exactly what's off, try to repeatedly draw diagonal strokes of the same size as fast as possible in any paint application for a good minute or two. Do it in both Windows and OSX and you'll notice something feels off about the OS you're not used to)
I tried a large number of things to get the feel right (all the old blog posts said that only acceleration was to blame), but even with mouse acceleration disabled, something felt off. Right now I only feel comfortable using my mac with mouse acceleration set to -2x for some reason.
I eventually just gave up and uninstalled SC2 from OSX. Now I only play it whenever I'm dual booted into Windows. Almost all the other mac users I know who play SC2 use this solution.
You can download the driver without buying a new mouse (or lost your disc). I've plugged in Logitech mice with Microsoft Mouse installed before and it still seemed to work fine. http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/29220/microsoft-mouse
I think the complaint in this article is laughably petty. I've never noticed a lag. But on the topic of mice, I bought a Kensington mini-mouse about three years ago that I've used with three different laptops (2 Macs and a Thinkpad) and to this day I've never noticed a difference between any of the computers. I would recommend it just for its size and functionality, it's the best mouse I've ever used. I didn't even have to install a driver for it, it just works immediately when I plug it into my Pro. It does feel faster than the trackpad but I think it's just because of the nature of trackpad vs. a mouse and not because of any noticeable lag.
I've always had this problem, and as a result I really can't use an external mouse with OSX. I've never had a problem with using the trackpads.
Like one of the commenters mentioned, using synergy from a Linux PC solves the problem for me. For a period, I actually resorted to running a Parallels instance of Linux with the external mouse attached to it, and setting up synergy to share the mouse pointer with OSX.
I'd like to run Linux as the main OS on my MacBook Pro, but in Linux the problem is the opposite: I've never found any driver / setting that makes the touchpad work really well under Linux (any hints would be appreciated - of course, I could always run OSX in VirtualBox under Linux, connect the touchpad to OSX and share it using synergy.... :)
Yeah, that's the one reason I never really run Ubuntu on my Air, even after I successfully jumped through all the hoops to get it installed. :)
I tried several different sets of tweaks but none of them felt right. Especially, I don't think any of them let you select with one finger and then drag with a second.
That's one of the things that the fairly recent Multitouch patches to the Xorg input layer should begin to fix. How long it'll take for environments to start implementing things like that I'm not sure.
Touchpad support in Linux is a crapshoot and the uni-button, multitouch touchpads are even worse. If you poke around the Ubuntu forums there is a rewrite of the touchpad driver that works better for Macs. Then you just have to deal with the atrocious battery life compared to OS X (though that has to do with MBP's lovely implementation of EFI and the graphics switching).
I always knew that there was something off about the Mac OS X mouse pointer, but no one I knew really thought anything of it. Coming from using high end gaming mice on Windows machines for 8+ years, I could feel the difference with the mouse pointer on Macs having a slight lag to it no matter how fast the machine.
That being said, Mac touchpads feel like heaven and I haven't used a single PC touchpad that even comes close to it.
I noticed the exact opposite to be true. I regularly use Windows, Linux and OSX, and OSX seems to be the only OS that gets mouse movement right.
The cursor moves (at least subjectively) exactly like my fingers on the trackpad. On Windows/Linux it always seems either too slow or too fast.
Maybe it's just something you get used to. I use OSX 95% of the time and the 5% I'm on something else, I think the cursor is too jumpy. I'm sure if I flipped those numbers, I'd think OSX is too delayed.
I don't play FPS games, but it sounds like the lag is a major problem. If Apple has the lag by design, it would make sense for this "feature" to be turned off by default once you start a game, and turned back on once you quit.
Apple has never appeared to be particularly concerned with satisfying the hardcore gamers who tend to play FPS games and who would notice the lag, so this is probably a really low priority for them.
For what it's worth, I don't have a problem with the trackpad (which I think works better than on any PC, or with Linux), but i notice it with external mice.
This may be due to mouse acceleration being turned on. Even in Windows, you can tweak the mouse settings to be faster or slower, or enable/disable mouse acceleration.
Couple curiosity questions: Which system did you start using? Also, have you done any activities requiring high precision at fine detail, such as gaming or design?
There are a lot of ways for mouse input to be annoying for a particular OS / user. The bug described by the article, though, is not an area of "preference." The article claims that every device input to the mousing system takes [an extra? at least?] 32ms to be reflected in the state of the window manager.
To the question of whether it's "noticeable" or not, it'd be cool if someone wrote a driver or extension to intentionally add some additional lag. So even if we couldn't tell whether 15ms felt "snappier" than 32ms, we could at least report on whether 64ms feels "floatier" than 32ms, for example.
Not totally surprising that QuartzExtreme was mentioned. Flowing everything through a resolution-independence engine (right?) doesn't sound like it'd be free, even with fast procs and graphics cards.
Great point. Per my example above, we might only discover that "64ms kinda sucks", not that "an additional 32ms on top of the original 32ms kinda sucks".
And who knows, maybe after a "kinda sucky valley" there's some comfy-feeling region up above 250ms, where the "float" just feels okay. :)
Thanks! I hate OSX mouse. If it's not for the good trackpads on MacBooks and the new trackpad, I could have gone back completely to Windows.
Bought Logitech/Microsoft/Cheap store brands, none of them gives a smooth mouse movement on OSX. It feels like someone's holding ur hand while using the mouse.
I think this is plausible, but I don't think it's right - mouse input seems to happen when I want it to, I just have no idea where the cursor will end up. I hate hate hate using a mouse on my mac, it's probably the most elbow, wrist and shoulder harming activity I do.
I simply can't, after 4 years, move the mouse swiftly, and precisely to a point on the screen that I want. It falls short, it goes too far. I slow down to be more precise and the acceleration curve makes it go too annoyingly slow. I speed up and the cursor flies all over the screen. The cursor movement speed feels random and useless. I can't imagine how anybody tolerates it.
It's bloody annoying and the fact that there's not an option to just turn the stupid acceleration off is mind boggling.
I don't have these problems on Windows, Ubuntu, QNX, Haiku, Amiga OS, GEOS on the C64, RISC OS, the SNES mouse, etc. It's only OS X.
I don't even recall having the issue on MacOS.
I don't know if it was because I was damaged as a gamer when I was younger and can't appreciate something about the Apple way of handling mice, or Apple is just doing something wrong, but the way the device is handled on practically every other system I've ever used doesn't work like it does in OS X. It's infuriating and I've spent countless hours trying to fix it.
It's like my right arm has some debilitating muscle disease where I can't quite control what my arm does -- I can only give it vague directions and hope it ends up more or less where I want it to, then shift gears and take my time to get it to where I want it to go.
This problem annoys me a lot. I have a KVM switch and switch between Windows and OS X a lot. Every time I switch from Windows back to OS X the mouse behaviour is noticeably different and a moment is spent self correcting the mouse and quickly relearning it.
I have tried a few different mouse acceleration fixes/apps but still can't get it to feel right. This article explains why nothing I've tried works well.
Got a Razer Deathadder, they come with their own OSX drivers that seem to circumvent the issue. Also sad to see so many Magic Mouse users here ;) I know everybody has their own preferences, but that is not a good mouse.
I actually used a Razer Imperator, but I found it to be very flaky: about once an hour it would lose the plot completely and I'd have to unplug and reinsert the USB cable. Not a great experience in-game :-( I don't know if it was that particular mouse or the OS/X driver that was causing me problems, though.
I switched to a Steelseries Xai, and I've been loving it. It doesn't have any special mac drivers but all of the fancy settings are controllable via a little LCD screen on the bottom of the mouse.
I'm not sure if its affected by this "32 ms" problem. I only use OS/X so I might just be used to it at this point.
I have a Deathadder 3g Spawn and I don't use the Razer drivers.
If I look at my mouse in the app "USB Prober" I see OS X uses a 2ms interrupt to poll the mouse. If I'm not completely off that's 500Hz. More than the 125Hz that seems to be default USB polling frequency.
I found a hardware solution to this, it's not going to sound great though, but it worked for me.
I found that all optical mice suffer from a kind of blindness when faced with surfaces that do not have sufficient contrast and crucially sufficient variety in the pattern.
It's as if the mouse thinks it's still looking at the same spot if its moved on a surface like this, hence the delayed reaction or lag.
I searched far and wide for a suitable surface and I found a picture of pebbles on a beach worked best as long as the surface of the picture is also matt and not glossy.
This may fix the problem for some, but at least for me the exact same mice and mousepads worked fine in Windows and Ubuntu. It's an OS X software issue.
The author is probably right that there is an issue somewhere, but since I've been using SteerMouse (http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/) I haven't had any mouse annoyances anymore.
Not sure what it changed though; I thought it was the acceleration curve but for all I know it could be replacing the entire OS X mouse driver, laggy code and all.
The author says that the bug is in the OS X kernel, not in any driver, so if he's right, changing a driver would not fix it, which is a pity.
I've also had Windows friends complain about mouse lag on my OS X. I've always thought it was due to the different acceleration curves, but disabling OS X mouse acceleration never seemed to fix it.
The OS X kernel is largely a collection of pluggable extensions. It's likely an extension could take the place of the default mouse driver. In fact, the source might even be available to get down to the real issue.
Me too. I was very unhappy with the way the mouse felt on OS X. I even considered switching. Then I found SteerMouse, and now I'm a happy camper. Highly recommended.
I've long disliked the acceleration ‘feel’ of Mac OS X, and have worked around it with acceleration-curve adjustments etc., but I find the explanation provided highly doubtful. Why? Well, for one: various games circumvent OS X’s own mouse speed/acceleration settings, and when they do so instantly reproduce the ‘feel’ from Windows. The same is true when emulating Windows through virtualisation software. If this was a hardware lag issue, then surely both of these would be affected too? And even were it a hardware issue, it shows that you can remedy it in software.
I'd long believed that the problem would never be addressed, and then a couple of months ago I used a new Apple Magic Mouse with Lion; the acceleration and speed was so good out of the box that I didn't install USB Overdrive as part of my new Mac setup routine for the first time in over 5 years. Could it be that it's a driver issue, or just different devices have different acceleration characteristics? Perhaps, but whatever the case might be, I'm far less inclined to attribute it to input lag.
> The problem is caused by a bug somewhere at the windowserver level
> of Mac OS X, and not by a mouse driver. You can supposedly avoid
> the issue by disabling QuartzExtreme.
So not hardware-level, but UI level. So it would make sense that it would not happen in games that don't use the windowserver's cursor.
You used to be able to get rid of this (or at least dramatically reduce it) by turning off "ignore accidental input". Sadly, 10.7 doesn't appear to have an equivalent, at least in the UI.
Changing that option changed a lot. I loved it. But 10.7 is a bit better at managing it than it used to be, or it feels that way to me, so I don't mind as much as I did.
The mouse has always felt 'different' to me on OSX. I think this explains half of it, the other part being that the hotspot pixel for the cursor isn't actually at the tip, but two pixels down.
This has not been fixed since OS X Tiger. In fact, they even removed functionality that mitigated that problem. I used to run a small application that would patch the acceleration curves but that API has vanished since Leopard. :-(
I started using SteerMouse to get rid of the acceleration, which helped that part of the problem, but I didn't have an explanation of why playing Starcraft 2 on OS X feels less accurate than when I play on my home computer except that it didn't 'feel' right. I don't notice it when I'm just working or browsing the internet, but when I'm trying to accurately control mouse movement to specific spots repeatedly in a game, it's a glaring flaw. Kudos to the author for figuring out the root cause of the issue. Hopefully now someone will be kind enough to offer a fix.
I can't understand why this issue would persist in a major operating system.
Anyone who games at all can confirm this. There's a reason why no competitive starcraft player plays on OSX, despite it being available on that system. The lag is immediately noticeable. The acceleration curves are fixable and fine, but the input delay has led to enough frustration personally that I ended up installing windows on my MBP for gaming. It's a shame, I really like OSX as a platform, but these tiny hurdles stop hoards of gamers from touching it.
This is really interesting to me, because one of the key differences in the "feel" between iOS and Android is the touch "dead-zone"; Android's is larger, iOS' is nearly non-existent, and this often serves to make Android feel less responsive than iOS.
It's very curious that something like this could slip through into OS X given Apple's fanatical attention to detail, and the fact that they're aware of what that delay means for mobile UX.
That is interesting to me. I've developed an iOS game that uses precises touch/swipe gestures to control movement. In iOS 3.2 Apple changed the infrastructure for touch events such that there is a huge (100ms) lag for a swipe event. This made my game perform terribly in certain situations. I filed a bug with Apple and even spoke to an Apple engineer. I was told that the lag is there for system level gesture recognition and there is nothing to fix.
Strangely, I'm using a Cyborg R.A.T. mouse on a MacBook, and I can see a noticeable difference between mouse movement when using the touchpad vs. the mouse.
I'm not a gamer, but I appreciate the precision of a gaming mouse in my everyday work. I have never been able to use a wireless mouse because the delay is too disconcerting for me.
Is it possible that I'm getting less lag with my mouse than I am with the trackpad? Or is that in my mind?
Maybe it has to do with the fact that I like a pretty slow mouse (at least compared to some coworkers), but I've always felt that the OS X mouse felt much nicer and more natural than Windows.
Don't even get me started on trackpads either. It's like writing trackpad is a problem solvable by a single human being and that person works for Apple. Seriously, their trackpad is fantastic and every other one is complete garbage.
I've been looking for a mouse acceleration program that solves this problem. I can't tell you how many times I've installed / uninstalled Mouse Acceleration preference pane, Mouse curves, and that Japanese mouse acceleration program.
It's incredibly frustrating. It's one of the things that takes Mac OS X from a perfect operating system to a good operating system. And it's such a simple problem.
There seems to be some confusion here.. some people are referring to the System cursor (which is not drawn by the CPU/GPU at all) and some people are referring to in-game cursors (i.e. the system cursor is hidden, the mouse position is updated and a custom cursor is drawn as part go the game loop).
Microsoft used to provide a Mac driver for their Intellimouse range that seemed to fix this and changed the acceleration curve to match Windows which felt much more natural to me. Unfortunately since switching to a Magic Mouse I can't use it anymore.
I'm not entirely convinced that lag is the only problem, but I will say that the mouse problems are the primary reason I sold my current-gen 13" Macbook Pro a month after buying it. It was simply unusable with a mouse.
The reason I'm not convinced is that my old Macbook Pro running Tiger had the exact same issues, but a proprietary mouse drive called USB Overdrive X allowed me to remove the acceleration, and the mouse felt perfect. That driver apparently didn't work in Lion (or Snow Leopard), and every single script/setting/utility I could find for supposedly disabling acceleration didn't change anything except perhaps speed (sensitivity).
I've done original research where we tested users perception of lag. We tested 5ms, 10ms, 15ms, and up. We found that most people were able to perceive lag in the 30ms range, and so this post is correct when it says that. However, I was able to recognize lag down to around 15ms. (We did double blind tests and you had to indicate when you saw lag, not all of the events were lagging. It was pretty accurate, but this was a test for some gaming software and so the results weren't published.)
I perceive no lag in the Mac OS X mouse. I am very sensitive to it. I'm able to perceive the flicker in fluorescent bulbs, yet I do not see any lag in the mouse.
I think if he's seeing 32ms, it is some particular combination of hardware and software.
I've tested this again with my trackpad and my cheap logiteck trackball. No perceivable lag.
I play Team Fortress all the time, there is no mouse lag. There is, of course, noticeable network lag.
32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling.
Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, maybe even using some form of inverse kinematics, so that when you move your hand towards a small button aiming is smoothly assisted, and/or click target is helpfully adjusted in size to enhance Fitt's law compliance (like iOS keyboard keys dynamically changing sizes depending on the sequence of letters, hence words you type)
Of course this bites hard outside of this environment. It seems Mac OS X needs an API to provide some form of raw value access to the pointer so that arbitrary software (notably games) can conduct its own analysis.
Anecdotally, my personal experience has been that it never bothered me, neither in games (FPS and RTS) nor in WIMP.