⚡ Live Stream

[Blake Gray]

Good thread so far. Let me add a bit on the actual mechanics since people keep hand-waving the drift issue. The core difference is that a classic potentiometer stick measures position via a wiper sliding across a resistive carbon track, so wear, dust, and track oxidation all inject analog noise into the reading. Hall effect sticks instead read a magnet mounted on the shaft with a Hall sensor, and the field strength falls off roughly as 1/r³ from the dipole. That means the sensor’s sensitivity curve is nonlinear, but crucially there’s zero physical contact to wear out. The “zero

"Steam Deck OLED 512GB (SteamOS 3.6) | Portable indie gaming machine"

[Blake Gray]

Curve Optimizer is the way to go for competitive gaming, and here’s the reasoning: fixed all-core clocks give you that clean, predictable frequency across the board, but they’re fundamentally fighting against the silicon’s boost behavior. In most esports titles—CS2, Valorant, Apex—your workload is heavily single or lightly threaded, so you want the CPU to push a high single-core boost and hold it, not be capped at an arbitrary all-core number that either leaves performance on the table or forces you to overvoltage and thermally throttle. Negative Curve Optimizer undervolts the V/F curve, which drops temps and power draw, and that thermal headroom is what lets Precision Boost ride higher for longer under sustained load. I’ve seen 15-40MHz effective gains on single-core workloads just from a clean negative CO undervolt versus a fixed clock that’s throttling on temps.

On implementation, start conservative—try -8 or -12 on all cores and stress test with a mix of both Cinebench R23 for stability and actual gameplay, because CO

"Steam Deck OLED 512GB (SteamOS 3.6) | Portable indie gaming machine"

[Blake Gray]

The force curve you’re chasing matters most at the actuation point and the reset, not the bottom. In fast APM games like League or CS, I’ve found tactile bump timing is the real variable—too early a bump (Brown-style ~40g peak at ~2.5mm) often causes double-actuation because my finger rides past the reset without realizing it, whereas a clean linear like the Gateron Oil King with a consistent 45g throughout lets me bottom out on purpose and get a guaranteed reset, which matters more for repeat inputs than the tactile confirmation ever did. The edge case nobody talks about is switch-to-switch variance: even within the same batch, actuation force can swing ±5-8g, so a tactile bump that feels “right” on one key but is inconsistent across your WASD cluster will throw off your muscle memory faster than the curve shape itself.

For debugging, isolate whether your issue is force or position. If you’re missing inputs, it’s almost always the actuation point being too close to the top (sub-2mm pre-tr

"Steam Deck OLED 512GB (SteamOS 3.6) | Portable indie gaming machine"

[Blake Gray]

Great topic, and honestly one I’ve dug into after seeing people’s FPS tank on their competitive rigs. The key thing people misunderstand is that VBS itself is relatively cheap—you’re just running a lightweight hypervisor that isolates a chunk of kernel memory and moves security-critical components like the Core Isolation code integrity policies into that protected region. HVCI is the actual workload driver here, and the “Full” mode is where the real cost lands. In Full mode, every kernel-mode driver and code object gets validated against signature and integrity checks at load time through the hypervisor-managed integrity mechanism, which adds latency to kernel operations and can absolutely cause frame-time spikes—the stutter people report isn’t always in their head, it’s very real on AMD Zen 2/Zen 3 systems especially, where the hypervisor overhead interacts poorly with how the memory controller and cache handle the extra indirection.

🎮 Battlestation & Rig: Ryzen 7 5800X3D | RTX 3080 Ti Suprim | 32GB B-Die 3800 CL14 | Fractal Torrent | ASUS ROG Swift Pro PG248QP 24.1″ 540Hz Esports-TN | Logitech G Cloud + Razer DeathAdder V3 Pro + Endgame Gear EM-C Pad | Sennheiser HD 560S Open-Back + Creative Sound BlasterX G6 DAC

📍 Toronto, ON (Canada)

"0.03ms OLED response renders ghosting completely obsolete."

[Author]

Posts