Tablet reports

Overview

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.

Report rate

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".

Report contents

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.

Higher report rates

The current state of the art

As of Jan 2025, the highest report rates stated for a tablet are 300Hz. Even the leading brand, Wacom, only supports a maximum of 220Hz. Numbers in the 200Hz to 300Hz are surprising when we see mice that have report rate of 1000Hz.

Is there a hardware limitation?

No. As far as I know there is no clear hardware or system limitation.

Why don't we see higher report rates

I believe the reason is simple: The typical customer for a drawing tablet would experience no benefit while the tablet manufacturer would have to implement a more expensive design. In other words: Nobody benefits. The current state of affairs is "good enough".

See: 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.

Wacom - Does a higher, or faster, report rate mean better performance? (archive)

Finding report rates

Different tools can be used: Measuring report rate