Vsync and Mouse Lag

[homerdog]

Whenever I enable vsync in games I experience a minor but noticeable amount of mouse lag. It is bad enough to make me suck at all FPSs and gives me hell even in simple adventure games that involve a lot of point and clicking. Essentially it makes vsync unusable for me in all games. As can be seen from my GPU and monitor combo my FPS almost always stays above the refresh rate so the amount of tearing is comical.

My setup:
GTX260 - 180.43 BETA
E6750
4GB DDR2-800
Vista 64
1440x900 LCD sad

It seems both NVIDIA and ATI users have experienced this and solutions are few and far between.
http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t505795.html
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=10052
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=31&threadid=2175139
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?p=2789543
Lots more here

Problematic games:

• *All* games
• Fallout 3, Oblivion, and Morrowind are the worst offenders
• Source games
• Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
• Literally all games so I'll stop here

What didn't work:

• Forced triple buffering with D3DOverrider
• Tried all available refresh rates (60,61,75Hz)
• Various drivers
• Changed Prerender limit to 2 and 1
• Tried a PS2 mouse
• All combinations of the above and other snake oil tricks

What did work:

• Used FPS Limiter to set max FPS slightly below refresh rate. For example if I use FPS Limiter to cap Fallout 3 at 55FPS and force vsync and triple buffering with D3DOverrider I get a responsive mouse with no tearing. Unfortunately FPS Limiter does not work with all games - stupid DRM issues.

So perhaps someone knows of a reliable fix? Setting a global FPS cap should do the trick I guess, but I don't know of a way to do such a thing.

 

[Davros]

since limiting you fps helps
could you not limit you fps with high amounts of aa/af ?

 

[homerdog]

since limiting you fps helps
could you not limit you fps with high amounts of aa/af ?

I go as high as I can but normally I still get 80+FPS. Even so the lag persists (and is in fact most distracting) in the menus. Inventory management is a beotch.

I'm all out of ideas.

 

[Davros]

strange i dont suffer from it
have you got anything like "enhanced pointer precision" enabled or anything

 

[homerdog]

Hmm disabling epp may have helped a bit but not enough for me to rule out the placebo effect. It certainly isn't as it should be though, that's for sure.

Something to note, Crysis is basically the only game that doesn't suffer from this problem. Perhaps it has something to do with being drastically CPU limited??

I would've just attributed this to me being overly sensitive to input lag but since I can fix it with FPS Limiter it makes me think there is something wrong with my configuration.

Thanks for the help Davros. BTW, do you normally keep epp off? I find it hard to click things without it :|

 

[Davros]

just checked and i actually have it on :|

 

[Davros]

ok this is just a stab in the dark...

i bulit a pc for someone used an old ps2 key + mouse to set it up everything worked fine
so then i connected a saitek cyborg keyboard and the mouse wouldnt work, changed the mouse still the same, changed the keyboard and it worked fine (this was vista)
so i plugged the cyborg into my pc (xp) swithed it on and the mouse did work but I got extreme mouse lag (10 seconds)

so do you have an old keyboard you could try

 

[homerdog]

Actually I went out and bought a cheap PS2 keyboard a few weeks ago for unrelated reasons and I've been using it up until yesterday when I switched back to my (now dry ) Saitek Eclipse. No difference

I want to buy Far Cry 2 but I have no interest in playing any games at the moment when I have to choose between screen tearing and mouse lag. Maybe FPS limiter will work with that game..