As an aside, I find it amusing that more latency is introduced by a USB keyboard than existed in an entire 80's computer (from keypress to rendering on screen). See also: Carmack's rant about how it takes longer to put a pixel on the screen than ping across the Atlantic.
About the USB keyboard, that may be true only for the cheapest keyboard you could find, but basically not applicable anymore nowadays. Rather than giving you the details, let me link to this video, which is awesome at explaining it and much more -- the USB vs PS/2 part starts here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdgULBpRoXk&t=1766s
>at the time I did these measurements, my 4.2 GHz kaby lake had the fastest single-threaded performance of any machine you could buy but had worse latency than a quick machine from the 70s (roughly 6x worse than an Apple 2), which seems a bit curious.
>We can see that, even with the limited set of keyboards tested, there can be as much as a 45ms difference in latency between keyboards. Moreover, a modern computer with one of the slower keyboards attached can’t possibly be as responsive as a quick machine from the 70s or 80s because the keyboard alone is slower than the entire response pipeline of some older computers.
Most normal keyboards, mice, and USB HIDs report events at a rate of 125 hz == 8 ms between reports.
Gaming mice usually go up to 1000 Hz / 1ms, the wireless ones usually let you configure down to 500/250/125 Hz if you want a bit more battery life. I'm sure that gaming keyboards also have a high refresh rate.
If you have a 144 Hz monitor that actually means your (normal) keyboard and mice are reporting events less often than your display is updating.
A lot of gaming hardware is trash. 1000 Hz on the package, endless latency inside, buggy firmware, buggier and resource-hogging companion apps, which are always Windows-only, and there are still even "gaming keyboards" which are 2KRO, bad materials and so on
That being said pretty much any 1000 Hz mouse is better than any 125 Hz mouse when using high refresh rates because the discrepancy between the 125 Hz mouse poll rate and the 120 or 144 Hz display causes very noticeable jitter. If you have a mouse where the poll rate can be adjusted, this can be easily A/B tested; it's quite visible in high-framerate recordings as well (this can be done in OBS by using the fractional frame rate selector and just inputting 144:1).
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2015/08/experimental-zero-la...
As an aside, I find it amusing that more latency is introduced by a USB keyboard than existed in an entire 80's computer (from keypress to rendering on screen). See also: Carmack's rant about how it takes longer to put a pixel on the screen than ping across the Atlantic.