Face Off: USB vs. PS2

Of Mice and Men

Thresh's comments in BLACK

Kenn's comments in BLUE

Well, Windows 98 is out, and USB is finally starting to make an impact on the way we work and more importantly (for me), the way we play. The first practical USB peripheral many of us have experienced is the Microsoft Intellimouse USB, identical to the standard PS/2 Intellimouse with two major differences. First, the default software drivers allow the USB version to sample at 125Hz, greater than three times the sampling rate of the PS/2 or serial version of the same mouse under Windows95/98. Second, the USB mouse allows the wheel button (mouse3) to be depressed at the same time as the primary and/or secondary buttons. Whether this is a software driver or hardware wiring issue isn't quite clear yet, but it has definitely been one of the things that have kept many game players from seriously using the wheel-button. I myself hadn't previously switched to the Intellimouse for that exact reason.

USB seems to be the perfect solution to many of the problems Windows mouse-users have been experiencing - namely poor control in Windows and games. Players of Quakeworld and Quake II, wondering why they were getting 120fps or more, yet still experienced chop while using mouselook, could finally make the most out of their powerhouse machines. Mac users, who have since the dawn of time had a rock-solid mouse cursor to work with, were for the first time after 10 years almost matched by Windows.

Kenn
Well, for the rich and mighty, or namely those who could afford Pentium II systems or AGP Socket-7 motherboards, this seemed like a dream come true. However, USB had its share of problems. As detailed by Microsoft's Support Online Knowledge Base, USB signals can be extremely processor intensive (taking up to 10% of the processor with heavy movement), and unfortunately they tended to be somewhat low priority when compared to other system events such as I/O access and video refreshes. On a Pentium 200MMX, a USB mouse takes up anywhere from 10-20% of the CPU during heavy activity. On a P2-400, it can still go up to 11%. From these numbers, it seems that using a USB mouse might actually hurt gameplay, especially on processor-crunching games such as Quake II.