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Best Mouse for Precision Gaming?
ubergamer asks: "Logitech's Dual Optical boasts two 800dpi sensors taking 2000 shots a second, Microsoft's Explorer 3.0 only has a single sensor at 400dpi but takes 6000 shots a second. Then there's ofcourse the Razer Boomslang 2000 with a single 2000dpi sensor but is partially mechanical (dust argh!) So which is best for playing my favorite FPS?"
I personally love my dual optical mouse. It's very smooth and quite forgiving of not being completely parallel with the screen. Plus it has a nice "heavy" feel (which can be customized by pulling out the weight inside). The only thing I don't like about it is the rubber on the sides, but other than that, the dual optical is the mouse to beat for me.
Before switching to a more expensive mouse, you should check out ps2rate, you can boost the sampling rate of your mouse up to 200hz. It moves noticably smoother. This is not necessary if you're on Windows 2000 or XP though, but I use it on 98.
My logitech is an OK mouse, except for the drivers. In order to use the thumb button you need the logitech drivers (otherwise it works fine with the MS drivers). However, these drivers interfere with wheel usage in games and you cannot use the thumb button unless you bind it to e.g. the shift or ctrl button which makes it useless outside games.
The solution for the wheel problem is to kill the mouse software before starting the game or run a registry hack (available on the logitech site, well hidden though) which causes some applications to receive wheel events twice.
In addition to all this I sometimes have issues with my keyboard after coming out of hibernation mode.
I would go for the MS mouse if I had to spend my money again. The MS drivers are more stable. In terms of precision you shouldn't expect miracles from the logitech BTW.
Jilles
but it itsn't the only thing you have to remember.
Generally what you want is the fastest sampling speed. What is interesting is that in Windows XP (I'm assuming you are using windows for gaming) the USB ports are limited to a 125 hz rate, so in Windows XP, it is usually better to hook your mouse up through the ps2 port and up the sampling to something like 200 hz.
I believe that in 95/98/ME, you can't up the ps2 sampling rate that high (well, there are tools to do that, but even though they say they are sampling that high they really aren't.) I've heard different things about win2k and its ps2 port, so I'm not sure.
One more thing, you won't notice a difference if you are chunking along at 30 fps. This will only matter if you have a machine capable of running your game smoothly. (For example, running Quake 3 at 150 fps or something like that, you easily notice the difference when running your mouse at 200 hz. Your aiming will be much smoother. But if you run Quake 3 at 40-50 fps, you won't notice the difference because the extra mouse inputs are thrown out.)
I have the intellimouse optical... it's the smaller, less expensive microsoft optical mouse and, in my opinion, far and away the best they offer. You can get the huge grey intellimouse explorer, but I never liked the button layout, it was just TOO big (what's this fad with huge mice that you have to palm to even use?) and... well.. it died after a particularly minor amount of frustration-fed abuse.
I keep my windows pc around because I'm a rabid CS maniac and simply must have dedicated gaming hardware, and have considered changing both to that dual-optical logi AND the razer boomslang, if it will work better than my ms mouse. The only problems I have with optical (and experienced this will all ms opticals I've owned) are that sometimes I have to wiggle the mouse a bit before it "wakes up" and starts tracking properly (they light gets brighter when this happens), and I have serious problems making fast turns in my game. Basically if I jerk the mouse too fast in trying to do a 90 degree left turn to shoot some villain coming from that direction, all that really ends up happening is my character twitches and moves about 10 degrees to the right. Needless to say, I then die. Very frustrating. I've also had situations where my character suddenly is looking straight up. That's very disorienting. A friend had one that would suddenly look left. Odd.
Anyway, if there's a mouse that eliminates those problems, is optical (can't go back, I don't think, purely for the don't-have-to-clean-it benefits), and has 5 buttons that work as well as the ms intellimouse optical's, then I'll switch.
The Thumb button just looks like a middle button press.
If I could figure out a way to get the thumb button to register as button-6 instead of just a second button-2 I would have no complaints.
Some people might think needing so many buttons is overkill, but for Urban Terror I need all of the help I can get.