[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.
Enotus mouse test was a bit of a mixed bag, as you would expect the DPI was spot on and the maximum speed (with the usual grain of salt applied) looks good. The polling rate looks fine too but of course, we’ll go into that in more detail with Mouse Movement Recorder. The precision (acceleration test) is where we see the main weakness of the Avago 9800, its inherent hardware acceleration. The smoothness went fairly well though, laser sensors in general tend to lag behind in synthetic testing because of their inherent acceleration and snapping but the implementation on the Tyon is as good as you can expect of a laser sensor.
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. This benchmark is done on an open and run basis, but we run it at both 500 and 1000Hz to compare the two.
1000 Hz
500Hz
If acceleration is their weakness then maintaining a stable polling rate is definitely a strength of laser sensors, in both the 500 and 1000Hz result the Tyon performed well with a nice stable polling rate and no discrepancies in cursor/mouse movement.
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
8200 DPI
The jitter tests are another strong showing from the Tyon, with no noticeable jitter at any of the tested sensor resolutions.
So as you can see the Tyon performs just how you would expect a mouse with this sensor to, pretty well in all areas sans acceleration. That said, given that acceleration is the single most important metric of sensor performance I can’t really give any points here, to me its a real shame that manufacturers are in a DPI arms race that culminates in them using inferior sensors just to achieve a larger number for consumer bragging rights. Moving on from the synthetic into the subjective, I will talk about my real world impression of the mouse on the next page.
