ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced an arsenal of gaming peripherals and gear at CES 2024. ROG strives to transcend the limits of what's currently possible and its latest offerings are designed to empower gamers with the tools to dominate gaming worlds. These offerings include the ROG Keris II Ace ultralight gaming mouse, ROG Falchion RX Low Profile 65% gaming keyboard, ROG Cetra True Wireless SpeedNova gaming headphones, ROG Carnyx USB condenser microphone, and the ROG Archer ErgoAir Gaming Backpack.

ROG Keris II Ace
The ROG Keris II Ace is an ultralight gaming mouse made for competitive gamers and esports athletes. Designed with input and feedback from esports professionals, the Keris II Ace's sleek, minimalist aesthetic offers the perfect balance of functionality and form. Its environmentally friendly, bio-based nylon shell is derived from renewable castor oil, giving it an overall weight of just 54 grams to significantly reduce wrist fatigue during marathon gaming sessions. The optical micro switches used in the Keris II Ace offer consistent actuation and are extremely durable with a 100-million-click lifespan.

There appears to be a faction of hardcore PC gamers within the Microsoft Windows software engineering team—as evidenced in a developer blog post from late May. The section relating to "Reduced game stutter with high report rate mice" provided an early preview for improvements recently rolled out in a Windows 11 update (KB5028185 issued on July 11th). This week's fix "improves your computer's performance when you use a mouse that has a high report rate for gaming." Gamers running PCs on Windows 10 (or earlier) are—unfortunately—missing out on this latest and greatest feature.

Microsoft's blog stated: We know gamers hate stutter, and we're fixing issues throughout Windows so that an untimely frame-freeze won't take gamers out of their immersive experiences. Gamers love to push their systems to the limit in search of the best experiences in-game. Many also use sensitive, high DPI, high report rate mice to shave milliseconds off their response times and increase precision. At the same time, the world of gaming is more connected than ever with gamers relying on an increasing number of background apps while playing, like voice chat, streaming, apps for configuring your keyboard, mouse, or graphics card, and more. The Windows input stack was being pushed to its limits with high report rate mice and their input being delivered to not just the game, but also multiple background processes. In turn, that caused a significant amount of time processing input rather than providing as many cycles as possible for rendering the game experience."