G403 Driver
Salvador Baltimore
Back in late June of this year, I found myself needing a new mouse. My not-so-trusty incumbent mouse had developed clicking issues that were causing me to pull out my hair during PUBG sessions and day to day browsing. I prefer a simple mouse. I only use the basics, so why bother with or pay for all the extras?
My favorite mouse is probably the Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0. Released in 2003, tt represented the culmination of refinements made to the Intellimouse brand since its induction in 1996 and was a real fine piece of equipment. If I wanted it badly enough, I could track down some new Intellimice from eBay and be done with this ordeal, but I was interested in seeing how the market had progressed for the no-frills gaming mouse in the last decade. I began researching my options and narrowed down the field to 3 contenders, the Mionix Naos 7000, the Steelseries Rival 310, and the Logitech G403 Prodigy.
The G403 Prodigy comes in a black and blue box with simple packaging. I unwrapped the cord and plugged it up to get started. Like any USB mouse, drivers or software are not required for basic operation. For testing, I used a Corsair MMM300 cloth desk mat as the tracking surface. Right off the bat, I noticed severe tracking issues with the G403. The cursor movement was very erratic in Windows and made simple tasks frustrating. I checked the sensor for dust and tried again with no luck. I also noticed that if you shake the mouse, things inside rattle around and make noise. This does not inspire confidence.
I navigated to the Logitech website and downloaded the Logitech Gaming Software Suite v8.96. After installation, I opened the program and it instantly recognized the G403 and offered an array of customization options. The first one I went for is the surface tuning in an attempt to fix the tracking issues I was experiencing. The surface tuning menu offered three presets for tracking tuning, Default, Logitech G240 Cloth, and Logitech G440 Hard. I tried the default option first assuming that my tracking issues were just a software goof up. The tracking did not improve. Because I was using a cloth mat, I tried the G240 preset and got similar results.
The software offered a separate option for adding a custom surface. I chose this and was given the option to custom tune the mouse for my mat. I followed the instructions and once the tuning process was done, I noticed an immediate improvement. The cursor was still acting jerky, but it was much better than it behaved out of the box. On the advice of a forum post, I re-ran the custom tuning two more times. After three tuning sessions, the G403 was tracking well enough for my purposes. Being forced to install the software to get the mouse to track was less than desirable, but not a deal breaker.
I fooled around with the other pages in the Logitech Gaming Software Suite. It has button customization, macro functionality and pretty much anything else you would expect from a modern mouse software package. I jumped into the RGB customization section to play with the lights that are included with the G403. My PC is currently using a white color scheme and my keyboard has a white backlight. I made several attempts to match the color of the mouse backlight to my other parts, but had no luck. The white color as selected in the Gaming Suite only produced different shades of light blue on the mouse itself. Bummer.
Once I got the mouse into a useable state, I took it right into a selection of games. I found aiming in PUBG, Battlefield 1, Doom, and Metro: Last Light to be satisfactory. I use a grip that would mostly be described as 90% palm/10% claw and found the feel of the mouse in hand to be pretty good. It has a hump just beyond the DPI switch in the center that feels much higher off the desk that any of the other mice I tested, but I never felt that it affected my aim. Flicking the thing around the mat was effortless thanks to its low weight. The main buttons felt good to the touch and the mouse wheel was excellent, even during stressful weapon switch moments.
I had gone through a few different Logitech mice a few years back in search of a replacement for the Logitech MX518 mouse that I loved. I had tracking issues across multiple mouse pads with the M510, M500, and a G9x that were never resolved. Thanks to the Logitech Gaming Software Suite, the G403 Prodigy was able to overcome whatever caused this problem for me via the custom surface tuning. The rest of the Suite was well laid out, easy to use, and unobtrusive, which is more than I can say for some of its competitors (*cough -Razer Synapse- *cough).
As a huge fan of the classic optical mice, here is my upgrade pattern: MX 518 > G400 > G403. I have had the G403 for little over 6 months and suddenly it started showing issues. When scrolling either up or down, the mouse would randomly stop and start scrolling in the opposite direction. It is extremely annoying and makes scrolling pretty much unusable. Everything else is fine. RGB bling works. Mouse movements are perfect. What gives! After reading a bunch of forums online it turns out to be a common issue. So naturally I contact Logitech Support and after a little troubleshooting they deemed it faulty and sent me a brand new replacement which arrived in less than a week. Superb customer service as usual! As a bonus they let me keep the old faulty mouse.
To take the mouse apart you need to peel the adhesive teflon pads under the mouse. Carefully lifting them with a sharp blade to exposed the screws. Using a fine phillips screw driver carefully remove the screws without damaging them.
Pretty pleased to report that this venture was successful. The scroll issue was indeed the result of a faulty encoder. Looks like Logitech got screwed by a bad batch of encoders from Kailh. Replacing the similar sized encoder from eBay worked and the scroll issue is fixed.
Thank you so much for posting this information. I had a similar experience with my mice, (G603). The first replacement experienced the same issue after a couple of months so I had two, perfectly good wireless mice, but with this scroll issue. So, I followed in your footsteps, got myself some encoders and dusted off my soldering skills.
I have the logitech g403 wireless mouse (i run wired). every day, pretty consistently, my mouse will stop working for a few seconds and my cursor will freeze. this either fixes itself after a minute or so, or i force it to solve itself by unplugging it and plugging it back in, but i want this to stop in general.
my driver is up to date, and im on windows 10
anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?
when i switch from wired to wireless on my g900 theres a few seconds where the cursor freezes and it comes back after a few seconds, your mouse might be switching from wireless to wired very fast due to a bad connection, try another usb cable
Do you have multiple monitors? If so, there seems to be a bug in Windows 10 (might only be with AMD drivers, idk), that makes the mouse freeze if you have multiple monitors in certain situations. It happens more often if one of your monitors is off, but plugged in, or if it is a TV.
On the G400 that meant that the base of the cable where it attaches to the mouse is worn out. I've replaced the cable twice on mine. Maybe Logitech added better stress relief to their mice since then though.
To manually get the latest driver for your Logitech G403 mouse, you can go to the Logitech official website, find the right driver for your device model and version of Windows, then manually download and install it.
You can update your drivers automatically with either the FREE or the Pro version of Driver Easy. But with the Pro version it takes just 2 clicks (and you get full support and a 30-day money back guarantee):
3) Click the Update button next to the Logitech G403 driver to automatically download the correct version of that driver, then you can manually install it (you can do this with the FREE version).
@Mr Green, VB may systematically have ended up w/ the swrast driver, it's one of the conditions where the buggy swrast driver might be a genuine problem. Do you still have a log from that situation (or even now w/ the amber package, you'll probably use the same ddx driver)
@dimich, the parameter applies to the module regardless of the approach (unless you've the module in the initramfs, and added the config later w/o rebuilding the initrmafs)
The kernel parameter is required to tell the kernel to not initiate the simpledrm device, it's basically a hack b/c of the ongoing problems w/ the simpledrm device (and nvidia in particular)
You could also just add "initcall_blacklist=simpledrm_platform_driver_init", but enabling modeset in nvidia_drm strongly implies that you've no use for the simpledrm device anyway.
Damn, hate to admit but yes, a bit of an outdated mkinitcpio.conf file plus the KMS settings for Nvidia were the culprit. Was always booting in the console and never paid much attention to KMS since was not using a graphical shell. Anyway, adding kms to mkinitcpio.conf and adding the parameters as specified in Arch's Nvidia wiki and running mkinitcpio fixed things.
@kassane, don't post random excerpts of your xorg log that skip the relevant part.
Then read the post above yours: the modprobe.conf option doesn't cut it here, because it's not about enabling modesetting.
You *have* to use the kernel parameter to tell the kernel to skip the simpledrm device.
Xorg segfaulted and it seemed to be related to a missing i695_dri.so file. So I decided to install mesa amber, and removed mesa (since there was a conflict), in order to get this file back, but I ended up having no acceleration at all !
@alef_burzmali is using xf86-video-intel and very most likely shouldn't and in that case (it's a bad idea for anything newer than skylake and questionable for haswell and skylake) removing that package and using the regular mesa package is enough.
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