[section_title title=”Synthetic Tests”]Synthetic Sensor TestingÂ
This section is an evolving endeavour to improve the objectivity of mouse reviews here at Play3r, it shouldn’t necessarily be used to compare mice apples to apples but it should help us get a better feel for the quality of sensor implementation. The programs being used here are homebrew, so these results should always be taken with a pinch of salt but I think it is essential to supplement the subjective content of my reviews with some (slightly) more scientific testing.
All my testing is done on an OcUK Mega Mat XXLÂ
Enotus Mouse Test v 0.1.4
Enotus mouse test can give us a few bits of sensor information such as DPI and polling rate. The methodology used in this benchmark is to always run it at the maximum DPI the mouse supports and also at 1000Hz.
In Enotus mouse test the  Gladius did very well, the DPI was spot on, the speed was good and the acceleration was nonexistent. We can see the S3988 also fares better in the smoothness test then the A3310 does which is interesting and caps off an impressive performance by the Gladius here.
Mouse Movement Recorder
This benchmark gives us a direct feed of sensor reading versus pointer movement and it also gives us an approximate polling rate. So we usually only test at 1000 Hz here but given the Gladius claims to support a 2000Hz refresh rate so we’ll test that too.
1000 Hz
The 1000Hz results all look good to me with the Gladius keeping very respectably close to the rated speed with no errors present.
2000 Hz
Er, something a tad odd going on here by the looks of it! The polling rate here bounces around wildly from 1000Hz to 4000Hz which is a pretty extreme variance. Perhaps future firmware updates will sort this out, I can only provide the numbers as tested but for now I’d probably stick to 1000Hz.
To make sure it wasn’t a software problem I loaded up a program I don’t normally include in the benchmarks, DIMR. As you can see it also showed the polling peaking at nearly 4000Hz but it did concede that the average was more like 2000Hz. We can see that the response rate scaled properly at 4000Hz with a 0.26ms response time which is pretty mental, and 0.48 for 2000MHz is also pretty cool. 2000Hz will definitely bring real benefits and this is a glimpse of that with the much lower response times.
Paint jitter testing
This test is a bit less scientific, but drawing lines in paint gives a good visual representation of any jitter present. The methodology here is to perform the test at 1600 DPI, 3200 DPI, and finally the maximum DPI of the particular mouse which gives us means to keep results more consistent between optical and laser sensors. All tests are run at 1000Hz.
1600 DPI
3200 DPI
6400 DPI
The Gladius did well here too, with what I would consider to be normal levels of jitter at all DPI settings tested.
So a strong showing in the synthetic tests from the Gladius, with the exception of the bizarre polling rate results. Let’s see how it performs in real world testing.
