Warning to Owners of Saitek Gaming Products Especially R.A.T. 5 Mouse

Hi. I had a lot of problems with sluggish controls and bad performance in Unity engine based games AKA Assassins Creed especially Syndicate and Unity. I eventually put in a support request which you can see below. Bottom line is Saitek/Mad Katz went bust and the drivers for their mice and other products are well out of date. It turned out the Profile loader which has an icon in the system tray was interfering with Unity engine mouse and keyboard controls. They were slow to react and sometimes there was no reaction. Removal of the utility running in the background solves the problem. I thought the camera in AC Unity was setup in a weird way being sluggish and generally slow to react. All along it had been this problem !

This may be a classic case of old drivers but Saitek/Mad Katz were problematic all along, probably one of the reasons they went bust along with outrageously over priced products. Removing the system mouse driver for the R.A.T. 5 mouse means that left click no longer works on the mouse ! It’s obvious that any mouse should be functional with the default Microsoft mouse driver or whatever default driver is installed. I just ordered a new mouse from a manufacturer that seems to be financially healthy and has recent driver releases.

This problem may effect other games as well and in ways that may not be immediately noticeable. For example I noticed improved frame times in Syndicate after solving the problem. That’s the accuracy of the time between each frame.

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COMMUNICATION HISTORY
JorgeS @Ubisoft Support wrote:	07/10/2017 @ 09:10
Hello again Res1s7, Thank you for sharing that solution and great ho hear that it solved it for you. Please let me know if you have any other issues that I can be of assistance and have fun out there. Kind regards, Jay Ubisoft Customer Support
You wrote	06/10/2017 @ 17:18
Hi. Thank you for your support. The issue has been resolved, however I wanted to say what it was. I disabled all background applications. I updated all drivers. The files verified OK, no missing or corrupted files. These steps could have solved the issue. But I only very recently did a full system update, drivers and everything so I don’t think that’s what it was. I had had trouble with the mouse on exiting almost any Unity engine based game where left click no longer worked. I’ve been using outdated drivers for a Saitek MadKatz Rat 5 mouse. The company went bust so there have been no driver updates. The profile utility running in systray for the mouse appears to have been seriously badly interacting with the Unity engine. I could not disable the mouse system driver because otherwise left click no longer works ! Once I closed the profile util running in the systray all my frame times were much more accurate, I can run at even higher settings, and no more unresponsive controls ! I did not realise this was the problem because the mouse seemed to be OK with other games, although may have been subtly messing them up as well. New mouse time. So thought I’d tell you this in case anyone else gets the same problem with old, outdated Saitek Madkatz drivers as it took me ages to get to the bottom of this. Thanks for the help !
JorgeS @Ubisoft Support wrote:	06/10/2017 @ 10:35
Hello Res1s7, Thank you for reaching Ubisoft Customer Support. My name is Jay and I will be assisting you with your case. Sorry that you are having this issue and thank you for sending me your system files as they really help with my investigation. There are a few steps we can take in order to solve your issue. Could you please try the following: 1. Disable Background Applications: To check there is no conflict with other applications and the game, please try disabling your background applications (Temporarily disable any unnecessary programs and also any anti-virus / firewall software): If you are using Windows 8/10, start-up programs can be disabled through the task manager. Press CTRL + ALT + DELETE to go the task manager and go to the start-up tab. If you are using a previous version of Windows, go to the Start menu on your desktop (or, if using Windows Vista/Windows 7 press the Windows key and the letter R at the same time) – Type in MSCONFIG and press Enter – Go to the tab, which says Start-up – Click the option to Disable All – Press Apply, then Close then pick the option to Restart 2. Make sure the drivers for your video card are up to date It’s important that the components of your machine have the most up to date drivers. If they do not, then you may experience several different issues. To update your video and sound card drivers, you should visit your manufacturer’s website 3. Please verify the game files integrity To verify the game files, we recommend running the Uplay client as administrator to do this: – Completely exit Uplay. – Right-click on the shortcut which you use to launch Uplay. – Select the ‘Compatibility’ tab. – Tick the ‘Run as Administrator’ box. – Select ‘OK’ To verify the game files: – Launch Uplay. – Select the ‘Games’ tab at the top of the window. – Click on the game tile within your games library. – Select “Properties”. – Under “Local Files”, choose the “Verify Files” option. If an issue is found you will be given the option to Repair, click Repair. After repairing the issue, please verify the game again until no issues are found. When this has been completed you can then try the game again. The issue could be related with applications working on the background as your system should be able to run the game with higher settings. Do not hesitate in adding more information or asking any other questions you may have. Kind Regards, Jay Ubisoft Customer Support
You wrote	05/10/2017 @ 18:14
Hi. I have had a very sluggish and unresponsive controls. Sometimes the combat will be smooth but often my character fails to react to commands and get’s stuck rather than acting on the command. Assassinations from rooftops onto a target below sometimes fail to happen and I have to click the mouse multiple times to get the command to register. At first I was confused as to why this was happening as I’ve been running the game at my native resolution of 1920×1080 with Vsync (AMD Freesync) at around 50 to 60 FPS leading me to believe that the engine was performing well. I have the graphics settings on around medium to keep a high frame rate. The only other times I’ve encountered sluggish controls is in games when the frame rate is low (>= 20 FPS). So eventually I tried lowering almost everything from what I had set (Graphic settings, in sequence: Medium, high, Low, HBAO+, OFF) to Low, High, Low, SSAO, and OFF and with a resolution of 1366×768 (Vsync, AMD Freesync). After doing this much more responsive controls were noticeable. I don’t have this problem with other games and my system is a powerful one (Intel i5-4690k, R9 380, game on SSD). It can’t run Syndicate at full settings but I should be able to have the settings higher than I’m having to set them just to get responsive controls. The weird thing is that other elements of the game like the horse and carriage driving never seems to suffer from the same lack of response. I hope you can look into this issue because I’m having to put up with much reduced graphics quality just to get responsive controls. Cheers.