I have a G502X Lightspeed and a new laptop with a 165 Hz screen. I love the fast scroll of the free-spinning mouse, but it would be nice to also get buttery smooth SLOW scrolling in VS Code and stepless wheel zooming in graphical apps. But no matter what I try I can't get it working. Try this:

Experiment: Mouse vs laptop trackpad

• Put your mouse in free spin mode.
• Open the Windows Start menu or one of your favorite apps and compare SLOW scrolling with mouse and trackpad.
• Also compare zooming in Google Maps using mouse and trackpad.

You should see the same thing no matter the app or how slightly you nudge the wheel: scrolling is always "chunky" with the mouse (i.e. a few lines of text in an editor, 20-100 pixels or more in a browser depending on screen resolution and scaling settings, and discrete jumps when zooming maps). HOWEVER, scroll/zoom is usually smoothly animated between these discrete states. This is what companies call "smooth scroll", but it's not really - there is no difference whatsoever between scrolling slowly with a free spin mouse and one with a notched wheel. In contrast, the trackpad both scrolls and zooms with perfect smoothness - this is what I want from the mouse wheel.

In case you think that smooth scrolling might be impossible due to Windows internals, look what the Microsoft Surface Precision mouse can do (which was released way back in 2017):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfoANablIHs&t=700s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbkC3luHpjQ

You can get slow scrolling to look a bit smoother if you set mouse settings to scroll just 1 line at a time, but this comes at a cost of slower scrolling.

tl;dr

"Smooth scrolling" doesn't really scroll smoothly, even with a free-spinning mouse wheel. It just adds smooth animation to notched scrolling. Is there some way to make it ACTUALLY smooth?