 Logitech has been claiming for years now, and Corsair recently joined them, that their wireless gaming mice are indistinguishable from their wired ones, because they've managed to get the processing latency so low that either one is less than one millisecond, the fastest polling or sample rate that's available over the USB connection. And, like, that's pretty cool. No core dragging on your mouse hand has obvious benefits for gamers. But the thing is, is that we've mostly taken Logitech's word for it up until now, because we've never had any of the equipment that we would need to validate their claims. Well, no more. So we recently rented a Phantom 4K high-speed camera from Keslo Camera for our recent collaboration with Gav from Slow Mo Guys, and we figured, what the hey, we've already got it, we might as well use it. Ooh, that's hot. Speaking of hot, this segue to our sponsor for today's video, Storyblocks Video. Storyblocks offers you studio-quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost. Check it out today at the link in the video description. 🎵 Admittedly, we haven't devised a way to intercept the signal from the mouse before it ever gets to the operating system, video card driver, game engine, and finally, your display. So we aren't going to be able to address claims from brands like Logitech and Corsair about their mice achieving sub-1 millisecond transmission speeds. What we can do, however, is determine whether any of the mice that we're looking at today, including both wired and wireless models, are faster or slower in a way that could possibly be meaningful to gamers. Because here's the thing, our perception of mouse leg or mouse latency is dictated by the total delay that we feel between moving our hand and seeing the corresponding action on the screen. So as long as we can ensure consistency in all of our other variables, any difference that we observe from one mouse to the next comes down to the signal transmission time, whether it's along a wire or whether it's wirelessly to a dongle. Let's have a look at our test right here. We're running competitive shooter CSGO on this Corsair Vengeance gaming rig with a Core i7-8700 and GeForce RTX 2080. We've paired this with one of the fastest gaming monitors around, this 1080p 240Hz one from Acer. To record each run and measure our total mouse to screen latency, we're using a Phantom Flex 4K from Vision Research at 4K 1000 frames per second. So that means every frame here is just one millisecond. Now, you might think that to get a precise measurement for each mouse, we could just move the mouse around with our arms and then count the frame delay. But not so. At a thousand frames per second, any organic body is going to have too much give to get a clear start point. So we had to get a little bit more creative. Meet Norm, so named for its two not-or gates. With Alex's creation here, we can swing a hammer at the mouse and with these conductive surfaces on the backs of our mice and on the tip of our hammer, we can record the exact moment of contact with the indicator LED that's on this breadboard here. That removes the reliability of our measurements dramatically. And it's pretty fun to do. For our first round of testing, we're going to keep things simple. We're going to take one of Logitech's high-performance wired mice. So this is their new generation MX518 with their Hero sensor. And we're going to put it head-to-head against one of their high-performance wireless mice, in this case, the G703. So we're going to do the wired one first because the conventional wisdom would go that that's your baseline, right? First run, MX518. Fantastic. Wow, that's a really short delay. Our first run with the MX518 taught us a couple of things. Number one is that we could expect, with a wired mouse anyway, about 15 milliseconds of latency, according to our measurements, and that we could expect a high degree of consistency. One other key takeaway was that the creation of the apparatus to light up the LED when the hammer hits the back of the mouse was entirely unnecessary. As it turns out, using Difference Mode in Premiere to examine two frames, we could more easily identify the true starting point for our mouse movement. I am fascinated by this test. We really have to get the actual milliseconds. This is really interesting. That seems like a really big distance before it actually registers. That doesn't seem right. We're not making the rules here. It is what it is. Now, one special thing that we're making sure to do here is we're putting the dongle right here above the table to ensure that it's not subject to any unfair interference. First wireless mouse test. Here we go. With the G703 wireless, we weren't quite sure what to expect. Logitech claims the performance should be basically the same, but our common sense tells us that it couldn't possibly be, especially with respect to performance consistency, because wireless is far more susceptible to interference than a wired connection. Well, as it turns out, within the margin of error of our experiment, they were the same. Wow, that actually looks a bit faster, but I might just be crazy. So there you have it, guys. Not only did we learn that our wireless mouse performed the same as our wired mouse within the margin of error of our experiment, we also saw that they both performed incredibly consistently from one run to the next. But since we've got the rig set up anyway, we figured why not investigate some other manufacturer's mice? So we're going to start with Corsair's Dark Core RGB SE. We chose this one because it's Corsair's sort of equivalent sub one millisecond latency mouse, and we wanted to know how their claims stack up. Corsair's Dark Core RGB SE was an interesting one for us. It was still within the margin of error of our experiment, just as fast as both of the Logitech mice, but when we averaged our results, it did measure a little bit slower. The next thing we wanted to find out on our voyage of discovery today was whether it actually matters if a mouse can be set to a thousand hertz pulling rate. So the final mouse, Ultralight Sunset, has a bit of a bad reputation for being capped out at 500 hertz. Does it matter? Only one way to know. It actually tied for the lowest single response time, but compared to the Logitech mice, it was less consistent. Could this be due to the 500 hertz pulling rate? Until we have a thousand hertz monitor, it'll be hard for us to tell. We're not done yet though. For our last test, we pulled out a Logitech MX Anywhere 2 mouse. This is by no means a piece of gaming equipment, but it gives us a great point of comparison for all the high-performance gaming mice that we've looked at so far. Well, this was a great lesson for gamers everywhere. If you want to have the best, most responsive experience, you're gonna want to choose a gaming mouse. It was over double the average response time of all of our gaming-grade mice. And making matters worse, that's with Logitech's 2.4 gigahertz wireless connection, rather than Bluetooth, which introduces even further latency and more interference. The final nail in its coffin for gaming is that the sudden acceleration from our hammer kick would cause the sensor in some cases to lose tracking and behave erratically. So the conclusion here is pretty straightforward. While I want to again acknowledge that we weren't able to test all the way down to one millisecond, what we can take away from our experiment is that at least for Logitech, we have validated their position that anyone who claims to be able to tell the difference between their wired and wireless mice is either imagining it or full of sh**. But okay, tell you what, I will guess this one is faster. I'll say this one's wired. Oh, that's the wired mouse. Uh-oh, that's bad. Okay, in fairness to me, those mice had slightly different cables on them, and that was probably what I was picking up on. Now, a secondary observation here is that Corsair's wireless appears, at least within the margin of error of our test, to be on par with Logitech's, though it is notable that our averaged results were slightly worse. Our next conclusion is that anyone claiming to be able to tell the difference between 500 Hz and 1000 Hz polling rates on a high-performance mouse is also imagining it. Even if you were capable of feeling a 2 millisecond difference in responsiveness, your monitor, because you don't have more than a 240 Hz display, would not be able to display it. Finally, do gaming mice have a value? Absolutely. Not only did our MX Anywhere 2, which to be clear isn't even a terrible mouse and we weren't even using with Bluetooth, have measurably higher latency, thanks at least partially to its 125 Hz polling rate, it also didn't track as well or as consistently, perhaps thanks to its less sophisticated sensor or its power saving features. Speaking of saving, I've been saving this segue for a long time. This video is brought to you by Storyblocks. You can get studio quality stock video clips for a fraction of the cost with Storyblocks Video. You can download all the stock video your heart desires from their member library, including HD and 4K footage, After Effects templates, motion backgrounds and more. And all the content is royalty free, so you can use it for commercial projects like YouTube videos, if you're us, or personal projects like YouTube videos, if you're us. New clips are added regularly, so there's always something fresh to download, so check them out today at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, if you love science, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy some of the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like the one I'm wearing, and our community forum, which is totally worth a join. By the way, I'm sorry the audio was so bad in these videos guys. We're just, we're in the science warehouse and it doesn't have, it's not coded, so.