How To Fix Mouse Cursor Lagging in Windows 10 After AMD Driver Update

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Remember the rule to keep everything up to date? That’s the golden rule for keeping your computer in a healthy state. Much like the “eat an apple a day keeps the doctor away” myth. Sometimes, keep ‘everything’ up to date isn’t always ideal, this is especially true if you are also running Windows 10 Insider build.

A few days ago, I updated the display driver on a newly built desktop via Windows update. You’d thought to trust every update from Microsoft in whatever is showing under Windows update, even third-party display driver. In this case, an AMD display driver below with exact driver version below (4/18/2018 – 24.20.11001.8003) was listed for one of the “Driver Updates” and I went ahead updating the driver without a second thought.

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Well, things start to go south right after the driver is installed. I started experiencing mouse lag and other kinds of visual cues delay. It’s extremely troublesome and frustrating to use after a few minutes of interaction. Everything is delayed with long pause lag up to 2 seconds. It seems very obvious that the new display driver from Windows Update isn’t working as expected (at least with the hardware I have, which is an AMD Radeon™ RX 580). Sometimes, there is also truthness in “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”. Anyhow, below are a few solutions if you too encounter mouse/cursor lag after a Windows Update.

Mitigating Solution

First, we can mitigate the lag by turn on an old trick under the mouse properties setting. Go to Settings > Mouse > Additional mouse options

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Go to “Pointer Options” and find the “Visibility” section, make sure to turn on “Display pointer trails and change the setting to the shortest possible.

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Hit Apply when you are done. By now you might still experience lag from any cursor movements, but it should be much manageable from an input and feedback loop point of view.

Download and Rollback To Previous AMD Driver

A proper solution is to rollback to the previous driver, if you don’t know what your previous driver version, it’s best to try to use the recommended driver from the vendor. It’s possible that your Windows 10 Insider build delivers the beta driver to you that aren’t available from the vendor themselves. In which case, if you are looking for AMD driver, be sure to use this link below to get the recommended drivers for your device.

https://support.amd.com/en-us/recommended

If no success after installing the recommended driver, you should rollback to a previous version of the driver. Here is some link that’s hidden deep from AMD’s support page on looking for previous drivers, find the appreciated version that fits for your OS.

Windows 10 64 bits | Windows 7 64 bits

That’s it, hopefully, this resolves any mouse/cursor lag/delay after Windows update.

/update on July 12, 2018 by Kent/

Well, it started happening on my computer as well ever since I installed an NVIDIA GeForce GT 710 video adapter. The mouse and screen lag a few seconds every time there is a notification popping up from the action center. It’s very annoying. Since I don’t know which drive I should be falling back too, I simply set the focus assistant to Alarms Only to minimize the number of notifications. It’s been much better.

11 COMMENTS

  1. Hi Jonathan, thanks for the warning, I have the same video card.

    I have seen this mouse problem in general more often than I should. It’s happened to me before and to people I know, with various hardware configurations. That “Pointer Trails” trick usually works, but I hate that it’s even necessary.

    Of course I wonder why it even works at all? What magic does that one simple setting hold?

      • The reason it works is that although the mouse itself is handled by software, the trails are a holdover from many windows versions ago, are is done by the CPU itself, effectively disabling the software mouse. Games with a Force Hardware Mouse setting do the same thing.

  2. Hi Jonathan

    I have started experiencing the identical symptoms you described, but only in a specific situation. I just thought I’d document it here in case it might somehow help resolve this problem.

    I connect my RX580 to my stereo receiver using an HDMI cable. When i power on my stereo, it in effect becomes a 3rd display device. This generally isn’t a problem. But at some point that I can’t quite identify yet, I start having this issue. Constant, regular 2 second mouse pointer pauses that are eliminated if I turn on mouse trails. The mouse wheel is unaffected; I can scroll a web page without pause.

    The problem is also eliminated if I unplug the HDMI cable from the stereo. Instantly eliminated. Obviously not a coincidence. If I plug it back in, the problem returns. But the problem isn’t always there when I first connect the cable. It’s like power saving. Which just now makes me wonder, is it after the 1st time my system powers off displays after the idle timeout? More tests required.

    Just curious, how many displays do you run?

    • Hi Glenn, thanks for sharing your finding! That’s interesting that the HDMI Cable or additional external hardware caused this. To answer your question I’m running on dual display, they are exactly identical Dell 27inch 1080p displays. The only difference would be the input that feeds to each display, one via HDMI and the other via Display Port converts to DVI.

  3. I installed last Drivers on my Ryzen ASUS Rog MOBO and the Audio drivers started this mess or maybe the Lan Intel card driver update.
    I dnt know I think it’s the Audio Driver update I should have not done. I dnt know.
    It stopped and then it started again. It really lags like stops for a second like a super old pc. What is this? A conflict? I reverted them back, it disappeared and then came back again.
    It looks like a virus somebody like working on my pc with a trojan.. I dnt know.

    What is this?

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