Mouse processor usage?

[Jon P. Inghram]

I find it fascinating that just moving the mouse around consumes an absurd amount of processor power on XP. This little chart compares times while running superpi with no mouse movement, moving a MS Wheel Mouse Optical, and moving a Logitech G5 laser gaming mouse:

       none         MS              G5
128k:  3.422   3.547 (+3.7%)   3.922 (+14.6%)
512k: 19.031  19.813 (+4.1%)  21.672 (+13.9%)

[Marshmallowman]

Not suprising , whenever I have the processor usage graph open you can notice the blips when clicking on things even just hovering over certain things.

I am assuming they are usb, I wonder what ps/2 mice are like?

[High_Jumbllama]

No extra usage here from just moving the mouse but mousing over for example the "Close Current Tag" button can cause CPU usage to jump by 2% but that's Firefox.

[schmosef]

Try it with the scroll wheel.

I found that the DivX codec didn't like it when I used the mouse wheel when surfing on a different monitor while playing a movie.

I recently switched to FFDShow instead of DivX and it works much better. I think that the DivX codec is more CPU intensive and I always assumed that the wheel was causing a lot of CPU overhead.

[Umfriend]

If I am not mistaken, it does not really matter what type of CPU one has either: the mouse CPU usage just grows with your system. Neat huh?

[schmosef]

yeah, terrific!

[Gurm]

I think that you'll find that it's tied to your... wait for it... VIDEO DRIVER.



No, I'm really not joking here.

The video driver processes mouse events.

The DIVX player uses more hardware acceleration than FFDShow does... therefore the video driver/card is busier at that time.

[Umfriend]

Then why does Mouse_Over_Netscape use much more than, say, Mouse_Over_Word which uses more than Mouse_Over_Desktop?

[VJ]

Gurm is right that there is hardware accelleration for the mouse in the video drivers. However, I think applications can choose not to use this accelleration (i.e. if they want custom effects, like mouse pointers other than the standard windows ones).

Just go in the display properties, troubleshooting, and slide the hardware accelleration slider one position to the left: you'll disable cursor accellerations. (which proves that it is there)
(this is not the mouse accelleration, but the drawing accelleration)


Jörg

[Gurm]

Well that's because mouse_over_Word has more event handlers to deal with - and more effects and poorly coded drek - than mouse_over_Windows.

And mouse_over_Netscape...?

C'mon, that's based on Mozilla - the code "so flamboyantly baroque" that it's a wonder it works. (The words of the head of Mozilla development, NOT my own quote!)

[Mehen]

I used to have problems using my original MS exlporer optical mouse with my old motherboard and cpu, when I got this new couple it worked fine.
The problems I had were for the most part only noticeable in FPS's, where the mouse would basically just "hang" for a moment - VERY annoying in twitch-based shooters - I ended up using my knife a lot in DoD because I couldn't hit a thing (the knife is awesome because it really pisses people off)
I never quite figured out what to attribute the problem to - but with my 3@3.6 and my P4C800 (as well as a MX510 now) I'm fragging like you wouldn't believe now

(I used to have a P4B533 4xAGP & 2ghz Northwood)

[spadnos]

Note that the original observation may not be entirely due to the actual execution time of the mouse driver, but due to CPU cache effects.

If the mouse driver doesn't have to process any events, then the cache will be left well fed with superpi code. When you move the mouse, it causes a slew of things to happen, including running the mouse driver code, running the event handlers for the active window, and updating things like pointer shape (transfers to the video card). This can easily cause the CPU cache to be emptied of all superpi code, causing an overall slowdown that's much more than just the mouse processing time.

- Steve

[Jon P. Inghram]

Anyone with a dual-core or multiprocessor system want to give it a try?

http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/

[Nowhere]

So...what's in ps2 vs. USB?

[Admiral]

Anyone with a dual-core or multiprocessor system want to give it a try?

http://www.xtremesystems.com/pi/

The CPU usage is around 50%