Customized computer?

[IFHTT]

Only the idiots who buy into all the marketing BS rave about super high DPI, like 3000+. Back in the day when the MX500 was the latest and greatest mouse in the world, nobody had problems with the 800 DPI sensor. It was enough resolution for everyone. In contrary to popular belief, shooter games were just as popular 5 years ago as they are today. On another forum I frequent, someone said something along the lines of, "You know why that guy just headshot you? Because he had a better mouse." Complete bullshit. Back in the day of Counterstrike, people were getting headshots with ball mice.

For all practical purposes, it's the quality of the sensor that matters, not the scanning resolution. It's the same reason why some digital cameras with huge resolution (7+ MP) are sold for dirt cheap, while other models with seemingly comparable specs are much more expensive.

Yeah I see what you're getting at, I was just kind of put off that for the price of the mouse, It doesn't give me the most functionality they could have... I'm not that worried about the whole dpi issue. Infact I'd have been none the wiser had I not read about you guys changing it on your mice... All in all I still love the mouse, and now I can just rid myself of the setpoint software altogether.

[Board of Command]

The whole DPI thing is a marketing gimmick for "gaming" products. The MX Revolution is a "professional" product, so they didn't incorporate that feature. It's still a kickass mouse.

[Kraco]

For all practical purposes, it's the quality of the sensor that matters, not the scanning resolution. It's the same reason why some digital cameras with huge resolution (7+ MP) are sold for dirt cheap, while other models with seemingly comparable specs are much more expensive.

Right now this is actually a problem because according to rigorous tests and hc gamer responses, the laser sensors that offer the highest dpi ratings are performing poorly in everything but dpi (and reading some special surfaces that one person in a thousand ever tries). It seems easy to get high dpi with lasers, so manufacturers are investing in that instead of making the new technology as reliable as the old optical. But on the other hand, I guess it's only a matter of time. Still it's one more reason why not to stare at the dpi at the moment as it doesn't really tell anything about how well the mouse behaves in practice.

Like ESReality said:

Laser vs Optical
In almost every mouse review I've read, the writer makes the automatic assumption that laser mice must be better than optical. I imagine it's down to the perceived firepower of each word. No one ever destroyed an Imperial Cruiser with an LED gun. The performance benchmarks show that todays batch of laser mice can't keep up with the finely tuned optical ones. They do have slightly higher resolution, but not enough to make up for their poor performance at speed.

[Buffalobiian]

So what exactly does "poor performance at speed" mean? I guess that's probably why I suck at close-quarter spraying. I pretty much bought a laser for the sake that it's a laser, much like the above assumption. Though nowadays, a laser mice takes over a large proportion of "higher quality" mice.

[Board of Command]

I'm guessing it means scanning/processing accuracy when you move the mouse really fast. The sensor only governs the input, so if the input resolution is really large then the controller chip might not be able to keep up with rapid movements.

[Kraco]

Yeah. In simple terms every mouse has a cut off upper speed. Up to that speed limit (with no mouse acceleration set; this is an important point) the pointer moves the same distance when the mouse is moved the same distance, no matter how fast the mouse is moved. Laser mice of today still seem to have a lower upper speed than optical mice. So, if in a game you move the mouse fast, the crosshair won't end up where you anticipated it would and you may miss a shot.

Both early optical and laser mice also had inherent acceleration, positive (mouse moves too far when moved fast) or negative (mouse doesn't move as far as you anticipated when moved fast), but that's something decent laser mice aren't anymore suffering of, either. When judging acceleration, it needs to be noticed Windows may set (at least XP does) acceleration by default, so the desktop is no place to judge that. However, good games use or allow direct input for the mouse, and any windows settings won't matter.

Mice are surprisingly complicated things when you dig deep enough... Doh.

[Animeniax]

Which is cooler? The minimalist keyboard:
Das Keyboard II

or the one with an OLED screen under every key:
Optimus Maximus

[Buffalobiian]

I'm going with the Optimus Maximus. Sure, I'll probably never buy it, but it's sure handier than your blank IMO. You can set it blank if you want I think, but being customisable gives it the edge over the Das. Of course, Das has it over Optimus in terms of pricing.

[itadakimasu]

Cooler : optimus maximum... its really cool.> however, $1600 on a keyboard is just lunacy.

Das: more practical.... still wouldn't likely pay $80 for it. Maybe if i find it for $15 on ebay...


The das would be cool for in the office though, it makes me think about the guy at the geek squad who was helping me and my wife.... he was slowly typing w\ his index fingers while looking at the keyboard... geek squad.... pfff, he's a noob.

[Animeniax]

I'd like the Das because you'd learn to be such an amazingly fast typist, plus you could stump all the users who like to stare at your keyboard while you type in your password.

The Optimus is cool, but mostly for show. I think you can even map keys to represent an action in a game, like the space bar would have an image of a jumping figure and the left ctrl would have a crouching figure image in most games. Pretty slick, but since I don't look at the keyboard much ever, it's kind of pointless to me.

Gotta ask, if he was a noob and you're not, why did you require his help?

[Board of Command]

You can make your own Das keyboard using a dremel and sander tip.

[itadakimasu]

Gotta ask, if he was a noob and you're not, why did you require his help?

Wifes laptop overheats and shuts off pretty often... all he did was take some information and then ship it off to somebody who could fix it.

[David75]

For mice:
More resolution would mean more data per second to handle. I guess the electronics in the loop aren't up to the task, be it in the mouse, the usb controller, drivers... anything.

It could also be the laser detector itself, that is to slow.
10 years ago I was playing with a stripped mouse and anlysing the detection with an oscilloscope, while having the inside wheel turning with a dremel. Clearly around 2khz the detection would drop because instead of being a sinuoïd, the signal became flat.

if the detector isn't quick enough, at some point the signal doesn't allow for precise tracking, when the speed increases.

Nobody cared to experiment, but it would be possible to construct a test bench easily to validate the theory with precise accelerations and speed.


Then is the mouse the only thing that matters in shooting games?
It seems that screens, cpu and GPU can add latencies up to 4 to 10 images. Not even counting ping (that may affect the game greatly)

as kraco said, in fact studying mouse problems can be very difficult.

[Board of Command]

It could also be the laser detector itself, that is to slow.
10 years ago I was playing with a stripped mouse and anlysing the detection with an oscilloscope, while having the inside wheel turning with a dremel. Clearly around 2khz the detection would drop because instead of being a sinuoïd, the signal became flat.

if the detector isn't quick enough, at some point the signal doesn't allow for precise tracking, when the speed increases.

You mean at 2 KHz, the mouse is not precise enough to detect the varying signal and just treats it as a constant?

[Animeniax]

You can make your own Das keyboard using a dremel and sander tip.

True, but you can also make your own hamburgers, but people still go to McDonald's.

That said, I'm seriously considering dremeling the labels off the keys on my Logitech media elite keyboard, just to improve my typing skills.

I think the original Das had some other features to make it more elite, like weighted keys or some such. The Das II looks too much like an old IBM keyboard for my tastes. If they could make a sleeker looking keyboard without key labels, I'd buy it.

[Board of Command]

Yeah, it's way too old school for the price.

[Animeniax]

It is a cool idea though. Imagine how much faster you could type if you were forced to learn the positions of the keys and couldn't rely on labels. Even now, I pretty much use only 6 fingers to type, I just type pretty fast with 6 fingers.

[Buffalobiian]

I personally don't think a keyboard like that is really necessary. You can get trained up just as well on a typing program. It might be a slightly different case for me, since when I had Windows 3.1, the only thing that was on it was typing drills, and my parents made me do them like I did homework.

And don't forget FPS where you lost your position on the keys and have to quickly find the knife button. That Das even omits the little raised bumps on the F and J key, doesn't it?

[Board of Command]

I can already type pretty fast without any special training. Most of typing is muscle memory anyway. When you place your hands on the keyboard in a particular, trained way, your muscles do the rest. It's not really a conscious task. When you're doing WASD, you're not telling your fingers to move to certain keys on the keyboard. Your mental process is simply "press the W key" and your finger does it.

Even the fastest typists out there would have trouble telling you the exact location of, say, the B key.

[Animeniax]

The Das II has increased curvature of the F and J keys so you can find the home location more easily.

Ditto to what BoC said, muscle memory is key for typing, not memorization of key location. For the knife or melee attack in FPSes, I always map an auxiliary mouse button. I've found though when playing games, sometimes I have to look at the keyboard to figure out where a particular action key is at, but I can almost do it quickly enough where it's not a hindrance, though it's probably what keeps me from being elite.