Sensor

PixArt PMW3360, once again. Why? Because it's the best sensor out there currently. With a proper firmware, you simply can't have issues with it, be it for you as a casual RPGer or an absolutely hardcore FPS player. It's raw and responsive and has no sensible smoothing at all. The nominal maximum tracking speed and acceleration values are 250 IPS and 50 G. The MCU is a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M0 based LPC11U37F made by NXP.

The resolution can be changed from 100–12,000 CPI in increments of 100 CPI. The polling rate can be set to 125, 250, 500, and 1000 Hz. If you like angle snapping, you can turn it on, but I always advise against using it.

The lift-off distance can be set in the Calibration tab of the driver software, which I will talk about a bit later. It didn't track from a DVD in height (roughly 1.2 mm) at its default setting on a black cloth mousepad.

Paint Test

There isn't any jitter on the reasonable CPI steps or angle snapping and measurable (or audible) sensor lens rattle.

CPI Divergence

The CPI accuracy is quite good; deviations are very small, almost negligible.

Perfect Control Speed

Perfect control speed is insanely high with this sensor, ending at around 7 m/s, which you simply cannot reach in-game. I could hit around 3.5–4 m/s. There were no malfunctions.

Speed Related Accuracy Variance

This test shows the sensor's accuracy at different speeds. You can see me doing a fast swipe to the right before I slowly slide the mouse back to its original position.

Any displacement is almost entirely caused by human error in this test. The SRAV is negligible in our case, which is just as one would expect it to be with this sensor.


Here's the same test done with the MouseTester software.

Polling Rate

All set polling rates are nice and steady and with no errors or malfunctions.

Input Lag

Most mice equipped with the PMW3360 have at least +2 ms input lag right above the 2000 CPI step (which is 2100 in this case since increments of 100 CPI are used), and this is due to sensor smoothing. The ASUS ROG Gladius II Origin suffers from the same, which isn't really much of a problem if you are not an absolute hardcore gamer. If you are, just stay below 2100 CPI and you're all set!

Click Latency

The click latency is roughly +3 ms compared to the SteelSeries Ikari, which is considered as a baseline with 0 ms. I set the lowest option in the driver software. The control subjects were a Ninox Venator and Logitech G102 (which were both slower by roughly 1.5 ms, but please note that this testing method is not entirely accurate). Just for comparison, most newer G-series Logitech mice have +4.5, while Zowie mice usually sit at around +8 ms. The data comes from this chart.