Sensor

The sensor of the Glaive is a variant of the PixArt 3360 lineup; in this case branded as the 3367. The 3360 line of sensors is currently the best available, so performance should be stellar.

Performance

However, it seems like there is a problem with sensor performance in this case. The loss of tracking at roughly 4 m/s is completely unexpected as the 3360 usually tracks up to 7 m/s and beyond. I can only speculate as to why, but such performance is definitely not acceptable for a mouse with this sensor. I realize that 99% of its users will probably never exceed speeds of 4 m/s while gaming, I rarely do, but there is no reason to artificially limit the performance. I hope this is just an oversight that can be fixed with a firmware update.


As you can see, if you stay below 4 m/s, the tracking is actually fine, so it's quite usable, and the regular user should not be deterred by this limitation of the sensor particular to Glaive.

CPI Accuracy

The CPI steps are all consistently above their proclaimed values. There usually is a slight variance to CPI with all mice (e.g. you set 400 CPI, but it really is something between 390-410); however, the more accurate the better. I perform this test because in the past, certain mice exhibited a very high divergence at their higher settings, where 6000 CPI would really be 4900 CPI, for example. The CPI accuracy you see below is at least consistent and within 5% of the proclaimed value, so it's not a big deal.

Speed related accuracy variance

With this test, I show how accurately the sensor reports movement at different speeds. You can see me move the mouse at varying speeds from a starting position and back again at a different speed. In the top-right corner is the showpos command in the Source engine. The second row shows the viewing angle, of which my point of reference is mainly the second one, the x-axis angle. With a script, I set my viewing angle to 0 0 0 at the start. After every swipe back to my starting position, I record the deviation from the starting position.

There is obviously some degree of error here due to me performing this test manually because I lack a test bench that is able to limit movement to the x-axis only. I have done this same test with a variety of different mice and sensors, so it's possible to compare. In this test, the angular displacements were -1.15, 0.51, 1.39, 0.87, 0.55, -1.86, 2.38, 0.16, and 0.20, which is actually a very good result and as expected for a 3360 sensor.

Lift off distance

The lift-off distance can be set to low, middle, and high in the software. On the low setting, the mouse doesn't track at a height of a CD, which means the LOD is below 1.2 mm. On middle, it tracks at a CD but not two CDs, meaning LOD is somewhere between 1.2 and 2.4 mm, and on high, it barely tracks at two CDs, so the LOD is roughly 2.5 mm.