Cursor delay / mouselag in games

[Roenie]

Hi guys,

RTS games are a type of game well suited to the smartnav 4. However, what happens in every game I play, RTS or otherwise, is that the cursor lags behind my head movement. How bad this is depends on the fps (frames per second) that the game runs at. Usually 90+ fps feels direct, but at 85 or under, the cursor feels delayed. It doesn't make gaming entirely impossible, but it makes it very frustrating and I can't play fast RTS matches or other fast games. At 45 fps it's just painful (unplayable).

When I grab the physical mouse (logitech G9, no drivers were installed) and use that instead of the smartnav, the cursor follows its movement instantly regardless of fps. Repetitive strain injury prevents me from using a mouse for long. Using smartnav means having to keep my fps above 90 in all games. That is asking a bit too much of my system, even though it's relatively high end. (Games are generally made to run at 35-50 fps on hardware available at the time of release.)

The effect that I describe as mouse lag is similar to what some TFT panels do. Their internal image processing, used to apply OSD color adjustments and upscaling of resolutions etc can cause delay between video input and video output, especially some 24" panels are affected by this. This adds a delayed feel to the mouse because there's extra time between moving your hand and seeing the result appear on screen. On the web there is a lot of talk about this, they call it mouselag. In Smartnav's case the cause may be different, but similarly, there is a delay between input and output. Depending on fps, the smartnav's delay is MUCH greater than a TFT panel 's delay.

So what causes this behavior?

I noticed that when using some software applications in windows, when the application hangs, the smartnav cursor becomes unusably slow within that application's window. It will sometimes still move , but there will be a delay of several seconds. As soon as I get the cursor away from the window of said application (i often have to use the logitech mouse to achieve that), it's fast again. The delay in games is nowhere near that bad, but maybe the two are related.

Why does the performance of the application / game used, have such a huge effect on the performance of smartnav? That doesn't happen to a regular mouse. (There is more calculation to do, I understand that.)

What can I do to fix this?

I tried setting the process priority of smartnav to highest, that didn't help.

Supreme Commander uses no more than 75% of my total CPU capacity. Smartnav uses 1% to 8%. I tried setting cpu affinity for the game and smartnav software each to their own core, this made the lag worse because the fps dropped to 50. Interestingly, setting both to use the SAME core and not allowing them to use the second core, also resulted in ~50 fps but with noticably less mouselag (still too much though). The cpu usage by smartnav does not increase while the game is running.

Vsync is off, turning it on doesn't help. (Makes it worse due to lower fps.)

Specs:
Smartnav 4
Software version 3.2 Build 37
Windows 7, but I had the same issue on XP earlier.
2560x1600, but also happens when running both desktop and game at low resolution (such as 1280x800).
intel E8400 Core 2 Duo, overclocked to 2.87 Ghz
HD4870X2
4 Gigs of RAM

Any help would be very much appreciated, thanks.
If you need more info, please ask.

-Roenie

[VincentG]

What do you have your motion option set to, within the SmartNAV settings?

Are you starting both the gaming application, and the SN software as an admin (try right clicking on the exe for each, and selecting run as admin)?

What happens if you run the gaming application in a window mode?

[Roenie]

64. Setting it to other values/min/max has no effect on the lag,

No, but I have just tried this as per your advice and it had no effect on the lag either,

Lag is also there in windowed mode.

[VincentG]

what video card drivers are you using?

[Roenie]

..but I have used an older version of this driver on XP 32bit where I had the same problem.

Any thoughts? I'm all out of ideas myself. I wonder if this is a problem with my system or simply that the smartnav software itself just isn't optimised with games in mind?

Do you have access to a system you could use to test this? Does the cursor lag behind, on that system when running a Direct3D game and the framerate is under 85? (You are sure to notice it if the fps is 50 or less, regardless of how sensitive you are to these things. It's impossible to miss. I suggest running Fraps and cranking up the FSAA to lower the fps if needed.)

Thanks,
Roenie

P.S. I tried disabling catalyst AI to make the card render using only one GPU core, this did not fix anything. It worsened the lag due to lower fps.

I also experimented with setting the Flip Queue Size of the graphics card. That's the number of prerendered frames kept in memory, ready to be sent to the monitor. On NVidia cards they call it "Max frames to render ahead". It can increase fps a little, at the expense of some mouse lag. The default setting for that (3) causes a tiny amount of mouselag even with a regular mouse, so I always used to set that to 1 or 0. So yesterday I installed Ati Tray Tools and used that to set Flip Queue Size to 0, 1 and other values. Didn't seem to affect the lag.

[VincentG]

Do you have the mouse delay option enabled within the SN software?

[Roenie]

No, it is set to 0.0 seconds

roenies profile.xml

[Roenie]

bump

[VincentG]

Are there any mouse settings, within the gaming application itself?

[Roenie]

In the case of supreme commander (used most for testing), no there are no mouse settings.

I'm not sure why you're asking this because as I said the lag occurs in every game, not just in supreme commander...

Regards