Software

The Pulsefire Surge uses NGenuity, HyperX's all-in-one software for their newer products. This program could be really nice with some tweaking, but in its current state, it really isn't something I can call handy. There are three HyperX logo buttons on the main screen, and each trigger a different lighting mode, but once you select your profile to tweak something, it actually resets and the profile's lighting settings load instead. Profiles can be created, deleted, imported, and exported on this main screen as well.

Now, the Performance tab made me scratch my chin in disbelief for a moment. The only thing you can set up here is the desired resolution and its corresponding color. Nothing else is available—no lift-off distance controls, no debounce delay, no polling-rate options. This is a thing I would have found ridiculous even 10 years ago, at least with a gaming mouse. Thankfully, the button options are all there, which means you can remap all buttons to your liking, and you can create all sorts of macros.

The HyperX NGenuity software consumes around 48 MB of memory while running in the background and takes up a staggering 1.15 GB of disk space in my configuration. Once you set everything up, you can simply uninstall it if you don't want it installed as the mouse has on-board memory.

Lighting

I'm not going to lie: the Pulsefire Surge has the most complex lighting setup I've ever seen. The possibilities are nearly endless with so many different options to choose from; lots of neat-looking effects, great transitions, and vivid colors are available. You have the option to choose between standard and advanced mode at the top. The latter only has two different effects; one is solid lighting and the other is a wave that runs around the RGB stripe in a motion you set. However, there are 35 individual lighting zones with colors you can set, which is ridiculously high! This is absolutely unique; as far as I know, no other gaming mouse has this many individually programmable lighting zones. Standard mode has solid lighting, wave, color cycle, breathing, and trigger effects available, or you can turn everything off if you'd like to.

I also made a video in order to demonstrate these lighting effects: