Software

I'll be honest here: Prior to reviewing this mouse, I dreaded even the mere thought of having to install Armoury Crate. But this time around, the experience turned out to be worse than ever. While the installation went through smoothly, the mouse simply wouldn't be recognized by Armoury Crate, and due to being a modular design, the device-specific module needs to be installed first before one is able to use said device. This wasn't possible, so using Armoury Crate wasn't possible, either. I was left helpless until one day, through a random application update, Armoury Crate magically fixed itself and suddenly recognized the mouse properly. Having gotten past this hurdle, I can report some progress at least: Armoury Crate no longer requires several restarts during and immediately after the installation process; instead, only installing a device-specific module necessitates a single system restart. The installation process as a whole is less time-intensive and laborious even though best results are still achieved when no ASUS device is connected. Furthermore, the RAM footprint has been trimmed down a bit. As a side note, Black Ops 4 instantly crashes for me as long as Armoury Crate is installed.

Much like in Armoury II, the available settings are distributed across several tabs. The first page houses button-remapping functions, which allow one to rebind all but the left button to mouse, keyboard, multimedia, or macro functions. The second page includes options for CPI adjustment (100–26,000 CPI, increments of 50, four steps), polling rate (125, 250, 500, or 1000 Hz), button response time (12–32 ms, in increments of 4), and angle snapping (on/off). My testing indicates that the button response time slider is neither accurate nor working, and ASUS indeed confirmed to me that this setting is no longer valid for any releases after the ROG Chakram and will thus be phased out eventually for the indicated devices. CPI adjustment is done through a slider, which can get quite finicky due to the range being so large. ASUS has informed me that improvements to CPI adjustment are being worked on, including the ability to manually enter values. Unlike on other 3370 implementations, CPI adjustment in increments of 50 is possible across the entire range instead of only up to 10,000 CPI. Lighting settings are detailed below. The fourth page houses LOD adjustment options. Through a recent update, ASUS has disentangled these a bit. By default, the "no calibration" preset is active. As long as this preset is selected, the high/low-selection below is not functional. Furthermore, several pre-calibrated surfaces are available to choose from, which then can be fine-tuned manually by adjusting the high/low-selection. Performing a manual calibration may lower LOD beyond the default. Lastly, profile management and a macro editor are available as well. For the Gladius III, ASUS also introduces a new feature called Rapid Fire. Rapid Fire essentially is an auto-click function, allowing one to execute successive button presses faster than humanly possible. To access this function, one needs to create a rapid-fire profile first. Having done that, a rapid-fire activator button ought to be assigned. When configured like that, a designated button can be used to toggle or shift another button to act as a rapid-fire button. Using this function requires Armoury Crate to be running.

All settings are updated live and saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running (or be installed) all the time. On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 208 MB on average when running in the foreground and 98 MB when minimized. Upon exiting the application, several processes with a RAM footprint of 83 MB keep running. Please note that the number of active processes and their associated RAM footprint will depend on one's system configuration.

In order to ease uninstalling Armoury Crate, ASUS released a tool specifically for that. Using this tool instead of uninstalling all Armoury Crate modules individually is highly recommended since it indeed wipes almost everything related to Armoury Crate off the system. Only a few derelict folders are left on C: drive and within AppData/Local, which are easily removed manually. That said, I found that in some cases, not only scheduled tasks, but also several services manage to escape their uninstall tool. The easiest way to get rid of those is to open the services application and search for any ASUS-related entries. After stopping those, note their short names. Then, open an elevated command prompt and enter "sc delete servicename" without any quotes and "servicename" being the short name of the service in question. Afterwards, it is recommended to purge the entire ASUS folder found within the task scheduler.

Lighting

The Gladius III has three lighting zones: scroll wheel, logo at the back, and several lines of text on the left side. Eight pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software: Static (single color), Pulsating (single color), Color Cycle, Reactive, Rainbow, Comet, Partition (alternating between zones), and AURA Sync, which synchronizes the lighting with any other connected AURA-enabled devices. Additionally, AURA Creator may be used to create a custom lighting effect that is then synchronized with other devices. Setting custom colors and adjusting the brightness is possible for most effects. Of course, it is also possible to disable the lighting altogether.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I go through the Pulsating and Color Cycle lighting effects: