Sensor

The sensor used is the PixArt 3360, the current top-tier sensor available in the gaming mouse market, and it shows with stellar performance.


In this picture, you can see the PCB of the Venator, prominently showing the 3360 in the middle of the board.

The sensor behaves like you would expect a top-end sensor to perform: perfectly. The tracking feels very smooth and direct and adjusts to small movements easily - even very fast flick shots can't make it malfunction.

Performance

To showcase the performance, I tested the mouse at various CPI steps in MouseTester and tried to move the mouse as fast as possible across the area of my mousepad. The result is excellent, showing no signs of tracking loss at even above 6 m/s. So it's fair to say that it's fast enough for any human to never have to worry about exceeding tracking speeds.

CPI Accuracy

The CPI steps are also very close to the proclaimed values. There usually is a slight variance to CPI with all mice (i.e. 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, for example. So the CPI accuracy you see below is actually very good and most of all consistent.


As you can see, the CPI steps are all a bit above their proclaimed values; however, they are very consistent in that you get used to it quickly anyway. So here, everything looks perfectly fine.

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 1.3, 0.23, 1.56, 0.84, 0.19, -0.27, -0.42, -0.72, which is actually a very good result and as expected for a 3360 sensor.

Lift off distance

The Venator has less than one disc of LOD, which is definitely low. Still, there were no tracking problems at all, which is very good in my books.