- This right here is a prototype of the AtomPalm Hydrogen,
the best gaming mouse on the market.
Theoretically.
Although the hardware is actually fairly standard
for a high-end gaming mouse,
it has a Pixart PMW3360 sensor and OMRON switches,
everything about it has been tuned
to offer the lowest possible response time
between you moving the mouse IRL
and the cursor moving in-game.
So is this the new competitive edge for gamers,
or have we passed the point of human capabilities long ago?
Well, one thing humans definitely aren't capable of
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All right, in a perfect world,
the movements that you make in real life with the mouse
would be 100% accurately represented in the computer.
But in practice, there are a bunch of things
that can lead to imperfect mouse tracking, and ultimately,
you missing that sick headshot by a couple of pixels.
So, what can you do to have the best possible chances?
First of all, disable your mouse acceleration.
Then, most games also have an option for raw mouse input,
so you should enable that too.
While we're talking about easy ways to up your game,
disable Motion Blur.
This won't affect your mouse, just (beep) motion blur.
Why does anybody use it?
The next problem is sensor spin-out.
This occurs when you move the mouse
faster than the sensor is able to detect,
and generally this results in the mouse failing horribly,
kinda like someone running on a treadmill
that's going too fast.
On office mice or cheap generic gaming mice,
this can be an issue,
but basically every real gaming mouse these days
is capable of tracking
anywhere from 30 to 50 Gs of acceleration.
Is that a lot?
Well, I was curious how that relates
to what's humanly possible.
So we found this fun article by H. Nagasaki from 1989
called "Asymmetric velocity and acceleration profiles
of human arm movements," and in those tests,
the maximum arm acceleration was 11.4 Gs,
and referencing other less-reputable-sounding studies,
we haven't found anything above 20.
So basically, there's no chance of you
physically outrunning a properly-tuned modern gaming mouse.
What can introduce errors, though, are sensor flaws.
For instance, the PMW3310 has a problem where,
if you lift the mouse and then set it down,
it can stop tracking properly for a brief time,
undoing all that work you put
into lining up your sick flick shot.
Fortunately, finding a sensor
without those kinds of game-breaking flaws these days
is actually pretty easy.
sensor.fyi has a list of sensors and mice
that are considered flawless.
So you can just cross-check with that
before you purchase a new gaming mouse.
Once you have a sensor that isn't doing anything weird,
make sure then that you have the lightest possible mouse.
A light mouse has two benefits.
For light mice, ergonomics kinda matter less,
since picking it up so easy,
and they also have less mass, which means less inertia,
so quick moves and adjustments should be easier.
Now, at 45 grams,
the Hydrogen is not actually the lightest mouse.
That goes to the Zaunkoenig MK1,
but the MK1 lacks a scroll wheel or even side buttons.
So the lightest properly-featured mouse is the Hydrogen,
bringing us nicely
to the party piece of the AtomPalm Hydrogen:
the 8,000 Hertz polling rate.
8,000 Hertz polling rate.
(crew member whoops)
What?
Okay, to really appreciate why 8,000 Hertz kicks butt,
let's start off a bit lower.
In the AtomPalm software, you can change the polling rate
to, well, anything you'd like.
So let's set it to 1.
Right now, the mouse is updating its position
about once per second, and it's horrible.
What's kinda funny about it, though,
is that it's not that it's totally unusable.
It does still work, like, it's still accurate.
It's just not a ton of fun.
Changing the polling rate to something like 125 Hertz.
Oh my god, this is gonna take me a second.
There we go, that's not bad.
And that makes sense, 125 Hertz is kinda like the standard,
so if you have an office mouse at work
or something like that, chances are that's its polling rate.
And with a maximum delay of just eight milliseconds
between when you physically move the mouse
and when the computer gets that information,
you can definitely tell when a mouse
is polling at 125 Hertz versus 1 Hertz.
But you can also tell the difference
between 125 and something higher.
So let's flip to, what, say 1,000?
- [Crew Member] A thousand, yeah.
- A thousand, all right.
This is what I would expect
from a high-performance gaming mouse,
and it really does feel more responsive,
everything from snapping around to targets
to even just, you know, clicking folders
and opening them and closing them.
It's just more responsive.
But the jump from 125 Hertz to 1,000 Hertz
is a seven-millisecond difference,
whereas going from 1,000 to 8,000 Hertz,
even though we're going eight times faster again,
it's just a .75-millisecond difference.
Is it possible to feel such a small change?
If people are saying this is better,
I do have to wonder if it's kind of a placebo effect.
Kinda like how we had a bunch of people
buy shirts on lttstore.com
and tell us what better gamers they were.
I mean, we're not saying it doesn't work that way.
You can try it for yourself, but...
For the mouse, anyway, we need some more concrete evidence,
so let's do a little bit of math.
With 1,000 Hertz polling rate on your mouse,
the maximum possible latency between moving your hand
and the computer receiving a signal that it has moved
is one millisecond, or 1,000 microseconds,
with an average latency of about 500 microseconds.
With an 8,000 Hertz mouse,
the maximum latency is now just 125 microseconds,
and the average is 62.5.
Now, our contact at AtomPalm says
that it's this average response time that is so important,
since with a thousand-Hertz mouse you will get used
to that average 500-microsecond delay,
while over time, you will actually get muscle memory
for the 8,000 Hertz mouse and move it quicker.
Just how much more accuracy can you expect from that?
To find out, Alex was locked in a dark room
until he emerged with the grand unified theory of leet,
which I will present to you now.
This allows you to input
the parameters of your mouse movement
and find out the maximum possible error
due to the polling rate of your mouse.
Since the most leet gamer move is,
of course, the 360 no scope, let's start there.
After studying epic gamer moments,
we found that the average 360 no scope
happens in about .4 seconds,
and by plugging that and average mouse and game settings
into the grand unified theory of leet,
we found that the maximum error on paper
with a 1,000 Hertz mouse during a 360 no scope
is 19.2 pixels,
while the 8,000 Hertz mouse is just 2.4.
Damn.
With that said, most people are not, no offense,
360 no scoping all the time,
so for a more realistic movement
of 20 centimeters over a span of one second,
we're looking at about an error of 6.3 pixels,
or 1.77 millimeters, which looks a little something like...
Oh yeah, that's...
That's not a lot.
But, at 8,000 Hertz, it's less than half as much.
Anyway, this potential for error is not taking into account
adjustments on the fly as you're making your shot,
'cause no one closes their eyes
and makes a one-second shot on muscle memory alone.
You see where your aim is going,
and you correct your movement
with the muscle memory for 1,000 Hertz.
Now, people were insanely good at "Quake"
with 125 Hertz mice,
so theoretical inaccuracy doesn't always translate
to missing the shot in real life,
which brings us then to the biggest question:
why the heck does any of this matter
if best-case scenario your display is running
at 360 refreshes per second anyway?
Well, we were curious too,
so we're gonna set up our most scientific of tests.
Our test consists of our mouse-testing robot
moving our device at precisely 2,000 millimeters per minute,
the Asus ROG PG259QN running at 360 Hertz,
and our Chronos high-speed camera
recording the movements at 1,000 frames per second.
I should note here
that high-speed cameras need lots of light,
and comparatively monitors are not very bright,
so the footage kind of looks like butt.
But, surprisingly, our test results
did manage to show a difference
between 8,000 Hertz and 1,000 Hertz.
What we're looking for here
is a perfectly-spaced mouse movement with no gaps.
The gaps happen when the polling rate
and the display mismatch,
leading to the highest possible latency
and micro-stuttering.
What I'm surprised to see is that
there is measurable stuttering at 1,000 Hertz,
and even 2,000 and 4,000,
but at 8,000 it is almost perfectly spaced.
Being honest with you guys, I did not expect
to see any real world difference here,
and only performed the test because Blur Busters thought
that 1,000 Hertz might show stuttering
at refresh rates of 240 Hertz and higher.
I really was not expecting the differences
to be, ah yes, this clear.
Now, it is possible to overclock
a small number of gaming mice to 8,000 Hertz,
that don't have support for it out of the box.
But for most mice, the maximum 1,000 Hertz polling rate
is hard coded into the drivers, which means,
unfortunately, that the AtomPalm Hydrogen is, well,
unfortunately for all the other mouse makers, I suppose,
legitimately the most accurate mouse on the market.
Although, being accurate is meaningless
without also reducing click latency.
Unfortunately, we don't have a reliable way
to test the debounce and latency of a mouse yet.
But AtomPalm wrote a research paper about how they have
the lowest theoretically possible click latency
by doing some fancy debounce stuff in the microcontroller.
If you feel like checking their work, you can go read that,
we're gonna have it linked down below.
The final hurdle though, of course,
for AtomPalm is reliability.
As far as that goes, well, only time will tell.
We haven't even been able
to test a final production unit yet,
so we can't properly comment on that,
or even the build quality,
'cause this one right here is 3D printed.
But Razor has announced plans
to release an 8,000 Hertz mouse
if you need a little bit more reliability.
So anyway, this is it, the AtomPalm Hydrogen,
theoretically the most accurate gaming mouse.
And although chances are
that you are not cool or skilled enough
to experience any of the benefits
besides the placebo feel-good-ness
of having the best, most legit mouse, man,
then, you know, bummer.
But hey, if you're an elite gamer,
you should consider picking it up
for just a little under $100.
- [Crew Member] Would you buy it?
- Oh, heavens no.
People should just get the G305.
It's light, the battery lasts basically forever,
and it's relatively cheap.
But hey, you know what's not cheap?
The hours of labor that my writing staff puts
into creating videos like this
and segues to our sponsor like this.
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If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy...
Oh, what was that slow-mo mouse nonsense?
(crew chatter)
No, no, not that one, the one where we test
wired versus wireless mice with a high-speed camera.
It was great.
And you could also check
"Does High FPS Make You a Better Gamer?"
We'll link them both.