ROCCAT Kone Pure Optical Software Overview

1:46 PM gaming , overview , roccat , software 0 Comments

     As I have said time and time again, one of the most important part that makes a gaming peripheral actually worthy of the 'gaming' tag is the software features said peripheral is able to provide. ROCCAT, as an experienced peripheral manufacturer, has also prepared custom software for their product line for users to customize peripheral settings to their own desire. Let's see what ROCCAT has done with their software dubbed "Talk" or "TalkFX".

     Before I start with the overview, a little note to those who might stumble upon this post because they were scratching their heads trying to figure out how to make ROCCAT's drivers work properly: You need to go to the product page, download the specific product's drivers and then only proceed to install ROCCAT Talk. For an example, if I have the Kone Pure Optical, I would first have to head over to ROCCAT's website, click on 'Support' then select the Kone Pure Optical from the products listing in order to download the driver for it. Only after that, would users be able to utilize the ROCCAT Talk software; which brings us to seemingly the first flaw of ROCCAT's software compared to other vendors: the lack of a centralized hub for driver downloading.


     Anyhow, ROCCAT makes up for their lack of centralized driver installation with what I dare say, one of the most full featured software I have seen to date. Upon firing up the application itself, you are greeted with the main control page which allows you to adjust everything that has to do with mouse movement like sensitivity and DPI settings. While that are the settings you would normally come across any sort of gaming mice that has software support, I find three very intriguing settings in this menu: the vertical scroll speed, the horizontal tilt speed and the double click speed. You can adjust both the vertical scroll speed and horizontal tilt speed (the horizontal tilt function needs to be mapped onto a mouse button first), making even normal web browsing a better experience.


     Moving on to the next tab, users are able to determine their own button configurations on the mouse. As you can see, with EasyShift [+], one can technically have 2 different commands for each button (except for the EasyShift[+] button itself), which sums up to a whopping 17 different function on a single mouse. To me, EasyShift[+] would easily be one of the reasons I would purchase a ROCCAT peripheral, it offers tons of functionality without giving too much physical buttons that may confuse users.

     Users can also map macros (multiple keystrokes) onto the mouse buttons. ROCCAT provides us with a bunch of preset macros for a plethora of popular games. Of course, users could also opt to record their own set of macros to their desire. Switching to the advanced macro editor also allows users to edit the delay between each different keystroke.

     Oh and before I forget, the Kone Pure Optical is able to save up to 5 profiles onto its on-board memory along with all the macros that users have configured beforehand in the software itself. This proves to be a very handy feature for gamers who frequent LAN cafes but prefer to use their own gear as there is no need to install additional software on another PC to utilize the profiles saved on-board.

     Moving along to the next tab, users get to customize even more things. Users can choose what colour they prefer the lighting of the logo to be and between the three lighting modes: fully lighted, breathing or lighting off. The colour picker also supports RGB codes so users can pinpoint their favourite colour. One thing that I would like ROCCAT to expand on would be to include a lighting mode that will switch between several colours after every breath, something like the ColourShift featured on the SteelSeries Siberia Elite.

     Users can also change the polling rate of the mouse to get a greater variation of mouse sensitivities. Other than that, users also gain access to Windows Pointer Speed configurations without actually needing to navigate to the configuration utility that is located in the Control Panel. Sound feedback on the other hand, is a very cool feature ROCCAT added to notify users what settings they are actually changing on-the-fly. Every time you change one of the relevant settings, an announcer would announce what settings you had changed; for an example, when users switch to 1200 DPI, the announcer would announce that users are at 1200 DPI, pretty nifty if you ask me.

     The next tab is called the ROCCAT R.A.D. R.A.D stands for "ROCCAT Achievement Display" which makes the entire tab name sound redundant as the full name would be "ROCCAT ROCCAT Achievement Display". Anyhow, like what the name implies, here you can check out all the achievements you've earned from using the mouse. I find the R.A.D a bit pointless, but some might say that sharing trophies is fun and all; unfortunately, the share function is mostly broken for whatever reason. You can refer to the screenshot below.

the broken share function.

      Nevertheless, the R.A.D still has a bit of usage in that it is able to show users the usage statistics of their peripherals, but other than that, the trophies are still a bit gimmicky to appraise ROCCAT for it.

     The last screen is pretty self-explanatory. Pressing the driver download button will lead users to the driver download page where users can install newer versions of the driver. I suggest that ROCCAT also display what's the latest version of the driver alongside the installed version of the driver so that users can know if their drivers are up to date in just a glance.

     That pretty much sums up ROCCAT's software implementation. ROCCAT's software is no doubt one of the most full-featured software out in the market. However, my biggest gripe with it would be the lack of centralization like other manufacturers. The need to download separate drivers for separate peripherals is really a hassle because some users might not be able to pinpoint what drivers they are supposed to install or assume that just by installing Talk FX by itself would be enough. Nevertheless, kudos to ROCCAT for the software implementation and hopefully they would continue to improve on their top notch work.