Serious mouse lag

Etni

Hi.

I'm having serious mouse lag, where the cursor is moving half a second or so behind. Both ingame and the control panel. I'm running Doomsday 1.9.0-beta6.9 (the one currently available on the site) on a Win7 64bit and trying to play Doom 2. I don't normally have any mouse issues in other games.

Anything I could do to try to fix it?

Cheers.

Lightning Hunter

There are two things that you can try that helped me:

1. Bring down the console in the game, and type "input-mouse-filter 0" without the quotes.

2. If you are using an Nvidia card, go to the Nvidia control panel and set the "prerender limit" to 3. you might have to create a game profile for this. If you don't know how, then do a google search. If you use an ATI card, then look for "flip queue size", and set this to 3. It's the same thing as prerender limit. Once again, look up these options on google if you need more details on how to change them.

Etni

Thanks for the reply, I appreciate you taking time to help.

I tried what you suggested, and it didn't solve the problem for me, but forcing vsync off (similarly from the NVidia control panel) did! Just thought I'll mention it in case anyone else has the same problem.


Now that I don't have vsync, is there a console command to limit FPS by the way?

(Anything above 60fps is just unnecessary heat and noise and power consumption for me, although this is just a minor issue and I'm perfectly fine playing the game at 200fps if such a command doesn't exist.)

Lightning Hunter

I'm glad you solved it. I was going to mention Vsync, but I personally hate turning it off because I get bad tearing. I'm surprised prerender limit didn't work for you. You can try turning prerender limit to 4 with Vsync on, and see if that changes anything (if you get tearing with Vsync off). Also, I personally found that forcing triple buffering lags the mouse in Doomsday, which is odd since it usually makes the mouse better in other games with Vsync on.

What Doomsday could really use is a direct mouse input option, and maybe even mouse smoothing.

DaniJ

Set the value of refresh-rate-maximum to impose a lower fps cap (default maximum is 200).

Set the value of input-mouse-filter to change the strength of mouse filtering/smoothing (default is 1).

Lightning Hunter

So input-mouse-filter is mouse smoothing? In all the other games I've played, mouse smoothing merely makes the mouse more sensitive to minor movements. In Unreal Tournament, for example, the crosshair will move in increments of maybe 5 pixels (this is just a guess) by default when you barely tap the mouse. When you turn on mouse smoothing, it will move in increments of 1 pixel. The same thing is true in Qrack for Quake. However, input-mouse-filter seems to do no such thing in Doomsday. In fact, I'm not sure what it does except add mouse lag in my scenario with my Razer Copperhead gaming mouse. The game has "smooth" mouse movement (increments of about 1 pixel) with mouse-input-filter turned on or off when I mess with it. In other words, the movement is identical, except I get some minor mouse lag with it turned on.

Etni

I'm not sure how dengine handles this, but typically mouse filtering, also called mouse smoothing, averages out the few latest mouse inputs, which can make the input feel smoother if you have jittery input due to for example a bad mouse, hand problems or an ancient ball mouse. Most often its better left off in FPS games.

I think you're describing mouse acceleration, which is a different thing and means the mouse moves relatively slower in slow speeds - in other words you can have precise movements when moving slowly but dont have to move your hand so much when moving the cursor across the screen (or turning in games). If you'd like to have this effect, use the software provided by your mouse. Windows has it too (calls it enhanced pointer precision) but its just on/off with no adjustments at all.

Lightning Hunter

I think you're describing mouse acceleration, which is a different thing and means the mouse moves relatively slower in slow speeds - in other words you can have precise movements when moving slowly but dont have to move your hand so much when moving the cursor across the screen (or turning in games). If you'd like to have this effect, use the software provided by your mouse. Windows has it too (calls it enhanced pointer precision) but its just on/off with no adjustments at all.

No, I'm definitely not referring to mouse acceleration. I just didn't do a very good job of describing what I was trying to say. When I go back and read my previous post, I can see why you thought I meant mouse acceleration. Your description of mouse smoothing was what I was trying to say. Basically, when some games have mouse smoothing turned off, the mouse will not respond at all to very, very minor movements with the mouse. Unreal Tournament, for example, moves the mouse one large "tick" when you touch the mouse with smoothing off. When smoothing is on, the mouse will respond to even the slightest movement, and will move a tiny fraction of a pixel, instead of one large "tick". I hope what I'm trying to say makes sense. I'm not referring to how much the mouse accels to quick movements; I'm talking how many pixels the mouse moves with the smallest movement you can make.

Mouse acceleration is the bane of my existence, and I believe no game should EVER have it. I refuse to play some Quake2 ports, because they don't remove mouse acceleration. I've seen some games turn on enhanced pointer precision in windows after I exit, and it drives me insane. I'm really picky about how the mouse moves. If I don't have 100% control in a game, I won't even play it.

In most games, the perfect combo for me is direct input with no mouse acceleration, and mouse smoothing enabled. That's why I find it odd that Doomsday is worse with input-mouse-filter, which is supposed to be mouse smoothing.

Etni

Oh, alright. Well, I guess the small movements with mouse smoothing come from the software averaging out the said movement and 0 (because mouse movement is 0 before you move it).

Anyway, I suppose smoothing too can be turned on from your mouse software, since you have a gaming mouse. So turn it off from Doomsday and set a game-specific profile in whatever software Razer has.