Software

The Kone XP is compatible with ROCCAT Swarm, which is used for other ROCCAT devices as well. While Swarm is clearly showing its age on an aesthetic level, I didn't run into any issues functionally.

All options are accessible through separate pages. The first of these includes the basic Windows pointer settings and CPI adjustment, which ranges from 50 to 19,000 CPI for up to five levels. Typically, the 3370 allows for CPI adjustment in increments of 50 until 10,000 CPI and increments of 100 from 10,100 CPI onward. On the Kone XP, increments of 50 can be entered across the entire range, though I do not know whether this is intended or merely an oversight, and the non-standard values aren't actually applied. CPI values can be entered manually, but non-native values are truncated to native ones. The second page has button remapping options, which allow one to remap all buttons to mouse, keyboard, or media functions, and EasyShift allows one to designate a shift button that can be pressed to access a second set of bindings. The third page concerns lighting options and is detailed below. The fourth page features miscellaneous options, such as polling rate adjustment (125/250/500/1000 Hz), LOD (very low/low/custom), and angle snapping (on/off). By default, LED sleep timer is enabled, which turns the lighting off after a set period of inactivity. In order to disable this option, "None" ought to be selected. Lastly, a macro editor and profile management are included as well.

When applied, all settings are saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running (or be installed) all the time. On my system, the software typically had a RAM footprint of 102 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the task bar, but goes down to 41 MB upon closing the application (minimized to the system tray). All Swarm-related processes display noticeable CPU usage, which increases to even greater levels when interacting with the software. Upon exiting the application, all processes are terminated, as they should be.

Lighting

The Kone XP has eight physical and logical lighting zones distributed across the left and right main buttons, scroll wheel, top button, and back of the mouse. A total of seven pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software. These are AIMO, Wave, Fully Lit, Heartbeat, Breathing, Blinking, and Photon_FX. For most effects, it is possible to set custom colors and adjust brightness as well as transition speed. For whatever reason, the "Lighting Off" option that was present on the Kone Pro Air has vanished again, which is why lowering brightness to zero is the only way to disable the lighting entirely.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I go through the AIMO, Wave, Breathing, and Photon_FX lighting effects.