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 hardware lag issue, then surely both of these would be affected too? And even were it a hardware issue, it shows that you can remedy it in software.
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.
> 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.
So not hardware-level, but UI level. So it would make sense that it would not happen in games that don't use the windowserver's cursor.
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.