Windows 11 Update Finally Fixes Stutters When Playing With A High Speed Gaming Mouse

If you run Windows 11 on your gaming PC, you may have noticed weird performance issues in your keyboard & mouse games: a strange stuttering, particularly when you’re moving the camera. That’s not actually a performance issue, or at least, it’s not the usual kind of performance issue. Instead, what you’re noticing is a problem with the way Windows reports your mouse’s position updates.

This issue can affect anyone with a high-report-rate mouse, starting at 1KHz, but it’s much more likely to affect people with 2KHz+ mice. It manifests as jerky mouse movement, which causes what looks like massive stuttering in games. Thankfully, Microsoft has finally rolled out a fix in the “Moment 3” update for Windows 11, also known by its knowledge base identifier KB5028185.

What was actually causing the problem is that Windows was sending every single position update of the mouse to every open application. When you’re doing regular 125-Hz updates, this is no big deal on modern machines, but when you’re doing 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, or 8,000 updates every second, this can start to put serious load on Windows’ input systems, especially on machines with weaker single-threaded performance.

razer mouse report rate — *Image: Razer*

To resolve the problem, Microsoft implemented throttling of background raw input mouse listeners and capped their message rates. This frees up performance, reducing input latency and eliminating the stuttering. Best of all it shouldn’t impact the function of background tasks, either. Microsoft doesn’t elaborate on why Windows 10 and earlier Windows versions didn’t have this same problem, although Windows 8.1 did have a similar issue with high-report-rate mice early in its lifetime.

Besides the mouse issue, Windows 11’s Moment 3 update should also improve the general reliability of Windows (particularly the Desktop Window Manager), fix issues with scanning barcodes, solve several problems with Narrator, patch up a problem with Teams that would make you miss alerts, and nix a niggle with excessive HTTP traffic and spooler service malfunctions when printing.

Of course, as with any windows update, there are some problems with the new release, too. In particular, there are a bunch of reports on the Feedback Hub that the update won’t even install properly. Some folks say that they had to institute a manual system repair after trying to install the update. Other users have tested and reported that Moment 3 does nothing to resolve the ongoing issue with SSD performance in Windows 11.

Our test rigs haven’t suffered any major maladies as of yet, but if you grabbed Windows 11 Moment 3, let us know how your experience went in the comments.

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