High refresh rates have cemented themselves among hardcore gamers who are competitive in eSports or just want the quickest possible response time. While refreshrates went up, monitors have also improved in other countless ways over the last few years, from response time to limiting flickering and ghosting. While 2019 and 2020 saw the rise of lightweight mice, now we’re starting to see more advancements in the actual technology behind mice from sensors getting more precise to optical switches that are stated to reduce click latency. Right now there have been two companies experimenting with 8000hz polling rate technology, Razer and Atom Palm. According to Razer’s numbers recorded over a 16ms time period, a typical 1,000 Hz mouse shows a 1ms delay (16ms divided 16 polling reports), while an 8,000 Hz mouse shows a 0.125ms delay (16ms divided by 128 polling reports).
As for who it would benefit, a monitor with a refresh rate of 240 Hz or higher is “pretty much essential” in order to enjoy the benefits of a gaming mouse with an 8,000 Hz polling rate according to Ayush Sharma, a Razer lead product developer who was interviewed by Tom’s Hardware.
Razer claims as low as a 0.125-0.25ms delay with its Avalon mouse compared to 2-3ms claimed with the G Pro Wireless. While this does seem like a slight shavings on latency, it’s not significant enough to warrant as much of an improvement as we saw jumping from 125hz to 1000hz polling rate. That being said if you’re dedicated to performance, it might be hard to go back after trying 8000hz. There are two drawbacks though, you need a beefy enough rig to handle the frame rate reduction that may come via the increased CPU usage. The second issue is that due to the increased power drain, we won’t see 8000hz on a wireless mouse anytime soon, for now its strictly a wired only affair. We’ll probably see a rollout of 8000hz mice in 2021 but we’re definitely a couple years off from this being a standard feature on all mice.