> they sometimes had explicit display hardware for just the mouse because that would cut out the latency That's still the case. The mouse cursor is rendered wi

> they sometimes had explicit display hardware for just the mouse because that would cut out the latency That's still the case. The mouse cursor is rendered with a sprite/overlay independent from the window composer swapchain, otherwise the lag would be very noticeable (at 60Hz at least). The trickery starts when dragging windows or icons around, because that makes the swapchain lag visible. Some window composers don't care any longer because a high refresh rate makes the lag not as visible (eg macOS) others (eg Windows I think) switch to a software mouse cursor while dragging.