X server pointer acceleration analysis - part 3

This post is part of a four part series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

In Part 1 and Part 2 I showed the X server acceleration code as used by the evdev and synaptics drivers. In this part, I'll show how it compares against libinput.

Comparison to libinput

libinput has multiple different pointer acceleration curves, depending on the device. In this post, I will only consider the default one used for mice. A discussion of the touchpad acceleration curve comes later. So, back to the graph of the simple profile. Let's overlay this with the libinput pointer acceleration curve:

Classic vs libinput's profile

Turns out the pointer acceleration curve, mostly modeled after the xserver behaviour roughly matches the xserver behaviour. Note that libinput normalizes to 1000dpi (provided MOUSE_DPI is set correctly) and thus the curves only match this way for 1000dpi devices.

libinput's deceleration is slightly different but I doubt it is really noticeable. The plateau of no acceleration is virtually identical, i.e. at slow speeds libinput moves like the xserver's pointer does. Likewise for speeds above ~33mm/s, libinput and the server accelerate by the same amount. The actual curve is slightly different. It is a linear curve (I doubt that's noticeable) and it doesn't have that jump in it. The xserver acceleration maxes out at roughly 20mm/s. The only difference in acceleration is for the range of 10mm/s to 33mm/s.

30mm/s is still a relatively slow movement (just move your mouse by 30mm within a second, it doesn't feel fast). This means that for all but slow movements, the current server and libinput acceleration provides but a flat acceleration at whatever the maximum acceleration is set to.

Comparison of configuration options

The biggest difference libinput has to the X server is that it exposes a single knob of normalised continuous configuration (-1.0 == slowest, 1.0 == fastest). It relies on settings like MOUSE_DPI to provide enough information to map a device into that normalised range.

Let's look at the libinput speed settings and their effect on the acceleration profile (libinput 1.10.x).

libinput speed settings

libinput's speed setting is a combination of changing thresholds and accel at the same time. The faster you go, the sooner acceleration applies and the higher the maximum acceleration is. For very slow speeds, libinput provides deceleration. Noticeable here though is that the baseline speed is the same until we get to speed settings of less than -0.5 (where we have an effectively flat profile anyway). So up to the (speed-dependent) threshold, the mouse speed is always the same.

Let's look at the comparison of libinput's speed setting to the accel setting in the simple profile:

Comparison of libinput speed and accel settings

Clearly obvious: libinput's range is a lot smaller than what the accel setting allows (that one is effectively unbounded). This obviously applies to the deceleration as well:

Comparison of libinput speed and deceleration

I'm not posting the threshold comparison, as Part 1 shows it does not effect the maximum acceleration factor anyway.

Analysis

So, where does this leave us? I honestly don't know. The curves are different but the only paper I could find on comparing acceleration curves is Casiez and Roussel' 2011 UIST paper. It provides a comparison of the X server acceleration with the Windows and OS X acceleration curves [1]. It shows quite a difference between the three systems but the authors note that no specific acceleration curve is definitely superior. However, the most interesting bit here is that both the Windows and the OS X curve seem to be constant acceleration (with very minor changes) rather than changing the curve shape.

Either way, there is one possible solution for libinput to implement: to change the base plateau with the speed. Otherwise libinput's acceleration curve is well defined for the configurable range. And a maximum acceleration factor of 3.5 is plenty for a properly configured mouse (generally anything above 3 is tricky to control). AFAICT, the main issues with pointer acceleration come from mice that either don't have MOUSE_DPI set or trackpoints which are, unfortunately, a completely different problem.

I'll probably also give the windows/OS X approaches a try (i.e. same curve, different constant deceleration) and see how that goes. If it works well, that may be a a solution because it's easier to scale into a large range. Otherwise, *shrug*, someone will have to come with a better solution.

[1] I've never been able to reproduce the same gain (== factor) but at least the shape and x axis seems to match.