The Logitech G Pro X2 Superstrike is spearheading a new generation of gaming mice. I’m not usually one for such grand pronouncements, but I really do think it is the case here; it will likely do for gaming mice what the Hall effect did for keyboards. Except Hall effect gaming keyboard switches were preceded by optical analogue ones, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say the Superstrike will likely do what Hall effect and optical tech did for keyboards.
That’s because it’s the first time a gaming mouse has had analogue technology in it that allows for adjustable actuation and rapid trigger. This lets you set your left or right click to register with only a little pressure from your finger, and then re-register immediately after starting to lift up from a previous click. The end result is drastically less click latency, ie, less time between starting to press your mouse button and having your gun fire in-game.
And Logitech’s chief engineer, Regis Croissonnier, seems to agree that, given this, the technology was «obvious»:
«If you think about it, (this technology is) ultra-smart: we have a fantastic idea. And on the other hand, it’s obvious, right? When you know it, when you have it in your hand, it’s obvious, right?»
That’s why the company ‘took all the shortcuts’ it could to get the mouse to market quickly. If it seemed like an obvious move for Logitech to make, it could be for other companies, too, and Logitech wanted to get it to market first. It was important to do so «without compromise», of course, which is a phrase I heard many times during my trip.
Though it might seem obvious after the fact, now we have the technology in hand, that doesn’t mean it was easy or straightforward to make. In fact, nothing about it is simple, given that it’s a mouse rather than a keyboard.
Induction
The first thing to note is that this doesn’t use the Hall effect like most analogue keyboards do, though it does use electromagnetic induction, which is very similar.
To simplify a little, with Hall effect switches, a magnet moves up and down with the stem and a sensor underneath measures how close this magnetic field is. With inductive switches, on the other hand, the magnetic field is generated underneath the stem by an electromagnetic coil on a PCB, and a thin sheet of metal moves up and down with the stem and disturbs this field. It’s this disturbance that is measured.
In other words, the main difference is that with Hall effect switches, there’s a magnet that moves with the stem and the movement of the magnetic field is measured, and with induction switches, a small piece of metal moves through a static magnetic field.
In the case of the Superstrike, as Logitech’s graphic below shows, under each key plate, there is a linear resonant actuator (LRA, ie, a haptic motor), a trigger plate (the moving piece of metal), and an inductive sensor (an electromagnetic coil and PCB). The trigger plate moves through the inductive sensor’s field, and when it passes the actuation threshold, the PCB triggers the LRA on top, right underneath the key plate, to generate a click feeling.
When I sat down to speak to Connoisseur, we were joined by another engineer called Frédéric de Goumoëns, AKA Fred, one of the inventors of the technology being used in the Superstrike. He explained how it works:
«(The inductive technology in the Superstrike) is also working with magnetism (just like Hall effect technology), but it’s more like an electromagnetic field. So the coils that you see (under) each key plate, they will generate a magnetic field. But the magnetic field is not static; it will vary.»
«(There are) very short pulses of magnetic field, and these short pulses of magnetic field will induce some current inside of that metal plate. So the metal plate has to be conductive, and this current in the metal plate will interact with the main magnetic field, and we can measure this interaction and then determine the distance between the coil and the target.»
So why not go for the Hall effect instead? One reason is that induction is cheaper and more efficient. We’ve heard this before, from Cherry, which claims induction switches are «half the cost of a mechanical switch» and are more efficient because a lot of the processing can be done on the microcontroller rather than individual Hall effect sensors.
Fred explains how this works with the Superstrike, too, as well as the extra effort you have to go to to get it all working with a microcontroller:
«Most of the time, the Hall effect sensor will kind of directly spit out the information. There is an output on the little chip that you put under the switch, under the magnets, and you just have to read it right away. For inductive sensing, it’s as fast as this, but it’s our own solution that we developed for inductive sensing, and we had to implement the driving ourselves in the microcontroller. So it was a big part of the project, also, to be able to drive them precisely and to get that output directly from the microcontroller.»
The technology apparently also makes more sense than the Hall effect for a mouse button’s short travel distance, given its extra precision:
«Full-sized keyboard switches, they have four millimetres of travel… Now we will think about the mouse. Here, it’s less than one millimeter of travel. The average total travel distance is more like 0.65 millimeters… Inductive sensing is much more sensitive to this type of very small displacement. So it was kind of the obvious choice to integrate this technology.»
Haptics
So much for the inductive sensing, but I haven’t even mentioned the haptics yet. Logitech is calling the whole suite of Superstrike’s click technology ‘HITS’, meaning ‘haptic inductive trigger system’, so there’s a whole other half to this equation.
This half of the equation is, it turns out, just as crucial as the first. That’s because without haptic feedback replicating the feeling of a click, you’re not getting a pleasant experience. Trust me, I’ve tried it. It’s a bit like pinning the tail on the donkey while blindfolded: it’s fun, and technically possible, but not exactly practical.
So, haptics are necessary, but they have to feel good, not just like a generic rumble. Fred explains:
«(With a keyboard) the tactility kind of comes from the impact at the bottom, even though the switch was registered much earlier. On the mouse, it’s kind of a very different scenario… We had some prototypes a while back without any haptic feedback, and we noticed it’s not usable as a product, the mouse. The gamers need this activity to give them the confidence that they register the click. The functions associated with the mouse clicks are so important in-game that you cannot not be sure if something happened.»
Connoisseur reiterates the same:
«It was the obvious thing, right? Okay, we need to have a haptic right, to provide the same click feeling that people have with a regular mouse.»
That’s why he says they knew from the start that haptics would be needed alongside this induction technology. The induction didn’t come first; haptics were part of the invention from the start.
Getting these haptics to feel like a click wasn’t easy, though. If you look at the haptic motor—what Logitech calls the LRA—it looks just like your standard one, used for many rumbles in many devices. Not usually for a sharp click feeling, though.
I can tell you, the Superstrike does feel very close (though not identical to) a regular mouse click, and perhaps most impressively, it can deliver sharp, distinct clicks—both upon actuation and lifting up—even with multiple clicks per second.
Fred explains that it took a lot of adjustment to achieve this:
«We really worked hard to make sure that as soon as the click has been detected, we can trigger the haptics right away, and you feel it instantly, as soon as you send the click, and also on the click that you feel. It took a lot of time for us to really optimise this feeling, because, you know, the component we are putting inside, it’s more like a buzzer. It’s not meant to generate a click feeling. It’s meant to make a long vibration.»
«So really I had to work hard on the driving of this, also working with the supplier of that LRA component, to really optimise what we can do with that component. And then we worked with the pro (players) to understand what was the feeling, that was kind of a legacy type of feeling, from the Superlight mouse. So testing with the pro, what’s the best sensation to generate with this? And then we landed it on that type of feeling that we provide to five different levels of intensity.»
In other words, it sounds like a lot of trial and error and gradual adjustments until the right sensation is landed on. For me, at least, I can say it was a resounding success. Over just a few days using the mouse, I’ve actually grown to prefer the haptic feeling over a traditional mechanical mouse click, which is saying a lot for someone who loves thocky keyboards and satisfying clicks and clacks.
Testing and improvements
Once HITS was well underway, there was the simple matter of actually getting it all into a mouse that’s ready for launch. One of the key goals on this front was to shave the weight down.
The first production prototype weighed 68 g, and after giving 150 of these to pro gamers, Fred says they discovered that «the benefit from the HITS technology was really the thing they care about, that the weight was kind of secondary for them.»
But the weight could still be reduced further. The next prototype was a few grams lighter, and then finally it ended at 61 g. (My own measurements have it at 61 g with a skate-laden puck inside, 60 g with a plastic one, and 59 g with no puck at all.)
A Logitech engineer says this was achieved in part by shaving down the mouse casing as much as possible without threatening rigidity. The bottom was shaved down from 1 mm to 0.7 mm, and the top from 1 mm to 0.8 mm. Further weight was shed by switching from steel screws to titanium ones and by cutting out some holes in the PCBs. Every little helps to compensate for the weight of the new HITS internals.
Apart from general testing of the sensor, its wireless capabilities and so on—involving giant antennas and mouse-flinging machines, but that’s a story for another time—the final test of the Superstrike’s HITS system was to be measured by a very precise machine. The mouse is placed next to another competitor, and the machine measures the time between the button starting to be pushed down and when the click actuates.
The result is that the Superstrike clicks 30 ms faster than the competitor mouse, which represents a pretty standard click on a modern gaming mouse, and the machine’s depression speed is apparently pretty reflective of a person’s standard click speed.
Real human results were also tested, too, of course. A whole bunch of them, in fact, according to the aforementioned engineer: «We recorded about 1,000 clips per gamer, more than 30,000 clips that we could analyse.» From these clips, pro gamers get about a 15 ms reduction in click latency on average, and non-pro gamers get about a 27–30 ms reduction.
I don’t know where I fall in those brackets in terms of how much the Superstrike is reducing my click latency, but I can certainly feel it.
If my time looking around Logitech HQ has shown me anything, it’s that the company has done a lot of legwork in a short space of time—just one year in development, compared to the usual two or three years—to bring HITS tech to market in the form of the Superstrike. It recognised the potential to kickstart an entirely new generation of gaming mice and developed it as quickly and thoroughly as it could. Here’s hoping other companies quickly follow suit.
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