Sensor

Tecware decided to use the PixArt PMW3360 top-of-the-line optical sensor in their Pro-series mice, which is absolutely fantastic news for gamers. This sensor provides very raw 1:1 tracking without any added acceleration, angle snapping, or any sort of filtering. Like all PMW3360-equipped mice, the Impulse Pro also has a small amount of smoothing above 2,000 CPI—you can read about it more under the input lag section.

Now for some specifications: The nominal maximum tracking speed and acceleration values are 250 IPS and 50 G, which is very high on both counts. There is no way of hitting these values during regular use. Resolution can be set from 100–12,000 CPI in steps of 100 CPI. The available polling rates are 1000, 500, 250, and 125 Hz, which are respective nominal response times of 1, 2, 4, and 8 ms. I haven't found any settings regarding the lift-off distance, but it's pretty low by default, less than the height of a DVD. Testing was done on a plain black cloth mouse pad.

Paint Test

There is no jitter on the reasonable CPI steps, and I couldn't detect any unwanted angle snapping or sensor lens rattling either.

CPI Divergence

CPI divergence is very low on this model; the measured values almost perfectly match the nominal ones. Please note that this testing method is not 100% accurate, but resembles reality well.

Perfect Control Speed

Perfect control speed (or PCS for short) is extremely high on this sensor as 250 IPS is over 6.35 m/s. There is absolutely no way of hitting such a high value during regular use, so this sensor won't spin out if you land a huge swipe.

Speed Related Accuracy Variance

This test shows the sensor's accuracy at different speeds. You can see me doing a fast swipe to the right before I slowly slide the mouse back to its original position. There is pretty much no acceleration or deceleration here, or if there is any, it's due to human error.

Polling Rate & Stability

All polling rate values are nice and stable, without any suspicious outliers or periodic drops.

Input Lag & Smoothing

There is no measurable smoothing or any other delay below 2,100 CPI. At 2,100 CPI, some smoothing kicks in, resulting in about +1–2 ms of input lag, which doesn't correlate with increasing the resolution. It is so low most users won't notice, but I would advise staying on a CPI step without smoothing for competitive gaming. For anything else, feel free to use whatever you like, though within reasonable bounds.

Click Latency

Click latency is roughly 18.9 ms when compared to the SteelSeries Ikari, which is considered as the baseline with 0 ms. The data comes from this thread and my own testings. Testing was done with a Logitech G100s and the Impulse Pro, using qsxcv's program.