Tablet reports
Last updated
Last updated
Somewhere between 100 to 300 times a second, your tablet sends a "package" of data to your computer. This package is called a "tablet report" or just "report". The tablet driver, operating, and application may modify that data. And of course a drawing application uses that data to draw a stroke.
You can see this often in the specifications for a tablet as "report rate". Here is an example.
"RPS" means "Reports per second"
Because this is a value per second in some literature you might see the unit Hz being used. So for example instead of "200 RPS" you might see "200hz".
The exact format of the data varies depending on the tablet. But conceptually the report will include data like this:
The x,y position of the pen
The pressure reading. 0 = no pressure or some positive integer if there is pressure
The tilt - composed of two values. Either given as a x tilt and y tilt or as altitude angle and azimuth angle.
The button press status
The report contains other interesting things, but these are the critical ones for drawing strokes.
As of Jan 2025, the highest report rates stated for a tablet are 300Hz. And for Wacom specifically only 220Hz. This can be surprising for those of us who are familiar with mice that have a report rate of one 1000Hz.
As far as I know there is no clear hardware or system limitation to why tablets. don't have higher report rates.
I believe the reason we don't see higher report rates is that for a drawing scenario an artist would not notice a high report rate. And so the current report rates are "good enough for their primary customer and table brands don't seem interested in improving them.
However, some people do play games with tablets. For example many people who play osu use a drawing tablet. And for a long time, they've wanted a drawing tablet with 1000 hz report rate. Because it would really help them play better.
I think tablet brands are aware of this desire from gamers but they haven't done anything to make the tablets work better for these scenarios.
