Sensor

The Kain 120 AIMO uses a new version of ROCCAT's Owl-Eye sensor, the PMW3381, which is basically a rebranded PMW3389. It's very good in terms of tracking and provides very raw and responsive feedback. Its characteristics are those of the PMW3389, which means some smoothing kicks in on 1,900 CPI and above, but more on that a bit later.

As for its technical specifications, the nominal maximum tracking speed and acceleration values are ridiculously high at 400 IPS and 50 G; there is no way of hitting these values during regular use. The resolution can be set from 100–16,000 CPI in steps of 50 CPI, and available polling rates are 1000, 500, 250, and 125 Hz, which are respective nominal response times of 1, 2, 4, or 8 ms. I couldn't seem to set the lift-off distance in the software, but it's low by default as the mouse didn't track from 1 DVD in height on a black cloth mouse pad.

Paint Test

There is no jitter on the reasonable CPI steps, and I couldn't detect any unwanted angle snapping or sensor lens rattle either.

CPI Divergence

CPI divergence is average, which means it deviates in the positive direction a little bit—if you come from a mouse with negative divergence or a pitch-perfect CPI accuracy, you might need to adjust your in-game sensitivity accordingly. Please note that this test is not 100% accurate, but resembles reality well.

Perfect Control Speed

Perfect control speed (or PCS for short) is extremely high on this sensor as 400 IPS is over 10.16 m/s. There is absolutely no way of hitting such a high value during regular use, so this sensor won't spin out if you land a huge swipe.

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. There is pretty much no acceleration or deceleration here, or if there is any, it's due to human error.

Polling Rate & Stability

All polling rate values are nice and stable, without any suspicious outliers or periodic drops.

Input Lag & Smoothing

There is no measurable smoothing or any other delay below 1,900 CPI. At 1,900 CPI, some smoothing kicks in, resulting in about +1–2 ms of input lag, which increases at certain resolution steps and reaches about 8 ms with 16,000 CPI. For serious gaming, I would advise staying below the steps with smoothing. For anything else, feel free to use whatever you like, though within reasonable bounds as high CPI won't net you an advantage while resulting in more jitter for less accuracy, which is the case with all sensors.

Click Latency

Click latency is roughly 3.2 ms when compared to the SteelSeries Ikari, which is considered as the baseline with 0 ms. The data comes from this thread and my own testings. Testing was done with a Logitech G203 and the Kain 120, using qsxcv's program. This value is achieved by ticking the zero bounce option in the software.