Sensor

Cougar quickly realized that even mice in the lower price segment should be equipped with good sensors. The one used in the Surpassion is the PixArt PMW3330, and it is pretty much a little brother of the well-renowned PMW3360. However, the PMW3330 surpasses its big brother in terms of input lag, but more on that a bit later. I could not really see the difference in performance as the responsiveness of the PMW3330 is great, its tracking as raw as it gets. The only thing I found is that it starts jittering a bit sooner than the more expensive model, at around 3200 CPI. Also, this sensor can only get as high as 7,200 CPI, but let's face it, even in the world of 4K resolution, that should be more than enough for everyone. The MCU used in the mouse is a VS09M17A manufactured by Vision.

The nominal maximum tracking speed and acceleration values are 150 IPS and 30 G. The resolution can be set from 500–7,200 CPI in increments of 50 CPI. Available polling rates are 125, 250, 50, and 1000 Hz. There is an option to adjust angle snapping, but for gaming, I would highly suggest turning it off. There are two lift-off distance settings, marked as low and high. The low setting didn't track from a DVD in height (roughly 1.2 mm), and the high setting didn't track from two DVDs in height. The measurements were done on a plain black cloth mouse pad.

Paint Test

There is no jitter on the reasonable CPI steps, or unwanted angle snapping and measurable (or audible) sensor lens rattle.

CPI Divergence

CPI accuracy is good; there are some deviations, but all were inside reasonable bounds.

Perfect Control Speed

Even though the nominal maximum tracking speed is only about 3.8 m/s, the actual measured one hit more than 4 m/s without any malfunctions. This should be enough for most people, unless you are Hulk himself and swipe ridiculously big and fast swipes.

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.


Here is the same test done with the MouseTester software.

Polling Rate

All set values seem to be perfectly stable; there are no suspicious outliers after multiple tests since the ones above are mere measurement errors.

Input Lag

Unlike its big brother, the PMW3330 does not have any input lag due to smoothing on any of its CPI steps.