32 millisecond cursor latency on Mac OS X

    OS X application developer Yevgeny Zuev talks about the cursor rendering lag for Mac OS X , which they cannot overcome in any way. This refers to the delay between receiving information from the mouse and rendering the new cursor position.

    It turns out that now the lag is 32 ms, which is why it is not so comfortable to play games on “poppies” as on Linux or Windows, where there is a higher reaction rate to mouse movements. Overly susceptible users are also annoyed by the subtle “slowdown” of the cursor in OS X.

    Evgeny Zuev says that the problem is present at least with OS X 10.4 Tiger, as well as in Snow Leopard and Lion. The delay is invisible to most users, and even if noticeable, negative feelings can partially be eliminated by changing the cursor acceleration parameter, or put another operating system on the Mac.

    Evgeny Zuev believes that, most likely, this is a bug somewhere at the windowserver level, and not in the mouse driver. We can assume that the reason is in the features of the implementation of hardware acceleration in OS X, because when you disable QuartzExtreme, the delay disappears.

    Their company is now looking for C ++ programmers to help deal with bugs in the cursor movement processing APIs and find some way around this problem. Eugene also says that the 32 ms delay problem is related to the previously detected bug of the jumping cursor, which Apple fixed in the Lion version after their bug reports. According to him, one of Apple’s developers has already confirmed a bug with a 32 ms cursor delay and said that Apple is working on a solution to this problem.

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