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Longtime Mac user here... for what it's worth, I don't know what the OP is referring to. I use both Mac and Windows regularly (home vs work), and I don't see a noticeable difference. Maybe I've just gotten used to it. Definitely isn't a problem for me.
I noticed the exact opposite to be true. I regularly use Windows, Linux and OSX, and OSX seems to be the only OS that gets mouse movement right. The cursor moves (at least subjectively) exactly like my fingers on the trackpad. On Windows/Linux it always seems either too slow or too fast.
I don't play FPS games, but it sounds like the lag is a major problem. If Apple has the lag by design, it would make sense for this "feature" to be turned off by default once you start a game, and turned back on once you quit.
Apple has never appeared to be particularly concerned with satisfying the hardcore gamers who tend to play FPS games and who would notice the lag, so this is probably a really low priority for them.
I'd long believed that the problem would never be addressed, and then a couple of months ago I used a new Apple Magic Mouse with Lion; the acceleration and speed was so good out of the box that I didn't install USB Overdrive as part of my new Mac setup routine for the first time in over 5 years. Could it be that it's a driver issue, or just different devices have different acceleration characteristics? Perhaps, but whatever the case might be, I'm far less inclined to attribute it to input lag.
32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling.
Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, maybe even using some form of inverse kinematics, so that when you move your hand towards a small button aiming is smoothly assisted, and/or click target is helpfully adjusted in size to enhance Fitt's law compliance (like iOS keyboard keys dynamically changing sizes depending on the sequence of letters, hence words you type)
Of course this bites hard outside of this environment. It seems Mac OS X needs an API to provide some form of raw value access to the pointer so that arbitrary software (notably games) can conduct its own analysis.
Anecdotally, my personal experience has been that it never bothered me, neither in games (FPS and RTS) nor in WIMP.
I've long disliked the acceleration ‘feel’ of Mac OS X, and have worked around it with acceleration-curve adjustments etc., but I find the explanation provided highly doubtful. Why? Well, for one: various games circumvent OS X’s own mouse speed/acceleration settings, and when they do so instantly reproduce the ‘feel’ from Windows. The same is true when emulating Windows through virtualisation software. If this was a…
> The problem is caused by a bug somewhere at the windowserver level
> of Mac OS X, and not by a mouse driver. You can supposedly avoid
> the issue by disabling QuartzExtreme.
To the question of whether it's "noticeable" or not, it'd be cool if someone wrote a driver or extension to intentionally add some additional lag. So even if we couldn't tell whether 15ms felt "snappier" than 32ms, we could at least report on whether 64ms feels "floatier" than 32ms, for example.
Not totally surprising that QuartzExtreme was mentioned. Flowing everything through a resolution-independence engine (right?) doesn't sound like it'd be free, even with fast procs and graphics cards.
Wild guess at where it might come from: 32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling. Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, mayb…
Wild guess at where it might come from: 32ms divided by 4 is 0.008s which gives us 125Hz (the typical mouse sample rate). So my guess is that some form of mouse movement analysis (like mouse smoothing) is working on at least four samples (so that it can statistically mean something), rolling. Why it does so might be that 32ms is the right time to evaluate the intent of a typical human interaction with a pointer, mayb…
I'm a little surprised that mouse state is something that a modern OS would be sampling (as opposed to, say, getting events 'pushed' by the device up through the driver). Or is this one of those "all event systems are really sampling once you look deep enough" things?
Bought Logitech/Microsoft/Cheap store brands, none of them gives a smooth mouse movement on OSX. It feels like someone's holding ur hand while using the mouse.