SUMMARY Every so often (10-15 mins) the mouse movement slows and seems to skip around the screen. My system was originally running a Nvidia GPU, which I then swapped to an AMD GPU (After removing all nvidia packages) and I immediately began noticing this odd mouse behaviour. I reformatted the system and reinstalled but I still noticed the mouse slow downs/skipping. I have tried using X11, and Wayland - both exhibit the same problem. I've run a number of benchmarks and did not encounter any drops in performance when this problem occurs (CPU or GPU). I also ran evhz to monitor the polling rate, and did not encounter any changes to the polling rate when the problem occurs. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Move the mouse 2. After some time either idle on the desktop, or in a game OBSERVED RESULT Mouse slows/skips around the screen EXPECTED RESULT Mouse moves smoothly Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.20.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.78.0 Qt Version: 5.15.2 Kernel Version: 5.10.8-zen1-1-zen OS Type: 64-bit Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core Processor Memory: 31.3 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD SIENNA_CICHLID ADDITIONAL INFORMATION I tried to record the behaviour using SimpleScreenRecorder but strangely, the recording did not exhibit the same problems with the mouse despite it being visible on screen.
Swapped back to my nVidia and am no longer experiencing the mouse skipping issues. This seems to be specific to mesa or AMD GPUs.