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Gaming Mice Get Benchmarked
Via Joystiq, an article at the ES Reality site where they do their level best to benchmark mice in a logical fashion. Post author Sujoy explains: "In this environment where performance is king, it's ludicrous to think that mouse performance has never been measured for reviewing the products. Imagine reviewing the latest graphics card in the same way. Without benchmarks, reviewers would have to resort to loading up their favourite game and commenting on how their frag count improved. You would have no way to compare NVIDIA and ATI cards apart from the quality of the packaging. Without benchmarking, graphics card reviews would be almost entirely useless. So why do we put up with mouse reviews that are just as useless?" They have scales based on control, speed, and DPI to determine how good, really, that mouse is.
Yeah, I agree. The first thing I did was look for a link to the printable version. Then, I noticed that they provided a table of contents for the entire article on the right hand side.
Who's really going to read the whole article anyway?
Actually, I use benchmarks to determine my sweet spot in the tug of war between price and performance. Good benchmarks help by providing useful comparisons between competing products.
I agree that most people don't really need the latest/best hardware. That's why most rational gamers look to good reviews (with good benchmarks) to help with their buying decisions.
I'm quite amused by the fact that several (relatively old) Logitech mice beat out the "gaming" mice. I hope to see more reviews of this type, because mouse performance hasn't been objectively benchmarked. (I'd also like to see other approaches, in case there are problems with this reviewer's methods.)
Surely mouse preference is subjective ?
Graphics cards have a small defined set of criteria that they are judged against. If a graphics card is faster than any other, with higher refreshes, and higher resolution, then for 99.9% of users it is percieved the best.
Mice however, require the user to be comfortable holding them, with the correct mousepad, with or without a wrist rest, and then there's wireless vs wired, bluetooth vs infra-red, trackball or optical. Some users swear by a simple 3 button scroll wheeled mouse, some users can't function without all those extra buttons on the sides. A high DPI is one thing, but for some that just makes the mouse TOO twitchy. Gaming is not ALL about twitch speeds, and frag counts. There are many games out there, where a slower moving mouse with higher accuracy is actually benificial (most of the God Sims, spring to mind).
At the end of the day, there are different mouses for different houses. What works for you, probably doesn't work for your neighbour. As such most mouse reviews have limited value, with or without benchmarks.
-Jar.
[Logitech MX510, on a kidney shaped plastic grooved mousepad - both at work and at home]
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"We need special programs just to make a difference between different graphic cards (or mice for that matter), so why should anyone pay more for a card if he's never going to see the difference between it and a cheaper model in real life apps." If you're buying a graphics card for anything besides gaming, you don't need to read any reviews. Just go buy any cheap off the shelf card to do your word processing and emailing. e.g Any $50 card will do. Benchmarks help to quantitatively decide whether one card produces higher framerates than another under different games at differing resolutions and detail. We need "special" programs because there *is* a difference in real life apps (i.e gaming). Very large differences. Take for example the misleading titles given to graphics card nowadays. You have idiotic scenarios like Geforce 4 mx's & Geforce Fx 5200s being outperformed by a Geforce 2 Ti. Or a x800 pro outperforming a x1300s. How would you know this? By testing them with benchmarks. Just because the benchmarks are primarily used by gamers to judge the relative 3d performance of graphics cards doesn't mean they're useless. They're just not useful to you.
They do. But unless you can actually benchmark, then you have no way of knowing how these affect overall performance. Like, what if you had tons of pipelines, but rather poor bandwidth to video RAM?
Also, how would you accurately predict what is "enough" in terms of performance for variious stats? How would you accurately calculate price/performance? And -- as demonstrated, if you read the fine article -- what's to keep manufacturers from lying/making honest mistakes? (Or marketing departments from inflating certain numbers for testosterone/marketing value even though the values are beyond what is useful anyways?)
Sorry, try again?