GAME CHANGING! Razer’s 8000Hz Mouse Explained
I have here in my hands, in this nondescript white box, an early engineering sample from Razer that’s about to change the pro gaming scene. It’s a gaming mouse with a polling rate of 8000Hz, which, sadly, isn’t over 9000, but it sure beats the 1000 we’ve got today. Let’s take a look at it, and explain more about why 8000Hz could be revolutionary, but first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
So, lets unbox this puppy. It’s in a rather fancy box, which when you open it up reveals.. A brown cardboard box. Amazing, I know. Then, we get to the magic. This is a modified Razer Viper, which still uses their optical switches, something we will talk more about in a moment, but the key difference is the controller. That is now a “high speed” controller that allows for the 8000Hz polling rate.
But actually, lets step back for a second and explain what the hell I’m even talking about. Back in the old days, when mice had literal balls rolling around inside them they used PS/2 ports. They worked, at least for keyboards anyway, by sending an interrupt signal to the CPU which would stop what it’s doing and register the key press. When we switched to USB, that flipped. The CPU, or really the USB controller, now asks the peripheral up to 1000 times per second what it’s current state is. So, when you click your mouse button, the mouse has to store that click until the next time the computer asks it for new information, then can send it over for the system to process.
Now because we’ve all been using the USB 1 protocol built into our peripherals, they’ve been running at a maximum of 1000Hz, but Razer wasn’t satisfied with that so they are, as far as I’m aware, the first company to be showing off over 1000Hz mice – the only peripheral I’d argue matters for this new feature. So, why should we all care? Well, there are a few key benefits. The first one is pretty obvious, the more times per second you can check the sensor to see where you’ve moved the mouse, the more fluid and accurate your movements on screen will be. There is potential for diminishing returns here, but some pro gamers have been playing with these for a little while and have noticed benefits, so who am I to judge?
The benefit you might not have thought about revolves around input lag, something I’m fairly well versed in testing. Input lag is the delay between you doing an action, like using the left click on a mouse, to that action being registered and shown on screen, like firing a gun in game. Making that time be as low as possible is really important in fast paced games, as seeing an enemy a few milliseconds earlier, and being able to have your click register a few milliseconds faster too can be the difference between hitting a stunning headshot and getting smoked and losing.
With mechanical switches, mice switches in particular, you have to do something called “debouncing”. Basically, when a mechanical switch is pressed, a piece of metal physically moves and slams down onto a contact patch. When it makes contact, it registers the click. Sounds great right? Well the thing is, it is a springy piece of metal, so it’s going to bounce. And because of that, you have to “debounce” that signal to make sure you don’t register multiple key presses, or a lift-off by accident. Because of the 1000Hz polling rate, the mouse normally has to wait 2ms before registering a click thanks to this debouncing – and that’s the fanciest, most high end mice, more average ones can be well over 10ms.
So in comes Razer and their optical switches. These just connect a beam of light instead of needing to contact anything, so can actuate in 0.2ms, and don’t need debouncing. When you couple that with the 8000Hz polling, you get a mouse input lag of around 125-250us which is way, way faster.
That doesn’t sound like a big difference, but considering people buy entirely different, and more expensive, monitors just to cut a few milliseconds of input lag, you can see why you’d want one of these too.
