Mouse DPI settings

On May 16 2007 15:04 JimBobRay wrote:
are your mouse sensitivity options part of a program that comes with your mouse or are you referring to Windows' built in mouse acceleration feature?

On May 16 2007 14:48 fanta[Rn] wrote:
I'm using 400 I think. 2000 is WAY too fast for me.

On May 16 2007 16:47 Zanno wrote:
ok

dpi is the rate at which the mouse samples movement

if one mouse has 500 dpi and another mouse has 1000 dpi at the same sense, the 1000 dpi mouse will move twice as fast as the other one

if you half the sensitivity of the 1000 dpi mouse, the movement will be the same speed, but far more accurate to the precise motion of your hand, as the sensor is tracking the motion twice as often (not to mention high dpi mice have generally more accurate sensors all around) there is an important exception to this - if you have such an extremely low sens that the mouse is only moving a fraction of a pixel every snapshot, then the high dpi does nothing.

to crank the sens of a high dpi mouse all the way up is pretty stupid, unless you have such good coordination that you can manage things with millimeter precision. sounds like a great way to give yourself carpal tunnel to me personally, but if it's working for you, then hey, that's cool

in fps games, lower sensitivity is generally considered conductive of more accurate movements. some professional counterstrike players do things like tape a grid of mousepads together because they seriously need that much space at their sens. i don't have a clue how this translates to rts games, it's not really the same type of motions at all.

On May 16 2007 18:14 ilovezil wrote:


by sensitivity, you mean the window's acceleration adjustment, right?

On May 16 2007 18:26 Mindcrime wrote:


acceleration =/= sensitivity

They are two different things. Acceleration speeds up the cursor as it is moved. Sensitivity is the base speed. Acceleration is bad.

On May 16 2007 15:31 ilovezil wrote:
Hold on. Explain the sensitivity thing to me. All I did was blindly set my DPI to 1600 and hit max on window's acceleration.

On May 16 2007 20:06 gameguard wrote:
I think someone has to ask this. How the hell do you change DPI?

On May 16 2007 20:09 jimminy_kriket wrote:

1600 in windows, 1200 dpi in sc with windows mouse acceleration at 6 which is supposed to be 1:1 aka it doesnt skip pixels in order to move the cursor faster.

On May 16 2007 17:51 TheosEx wrote:
I was under the impression that DPI increases the accuracy of your mouse movements as well as the reaction time. For example, if you try to quickly select a group of units in BW with a cheap mouse, your "box selection" will start off a bit late.

And oh, since people mentioned it... back when I play Counter-strike, I measured my sensitivity based on how many 360's I could do too. On 1024x768 resolution, my CS sensitivity was 18.5, and full Windows sensitivity. That's about 6x 360s per mousepad slide.

On May 16 2007 20:36 Zanno wrote:
there are more factors than just dpi involved there, but i imagine it can't hurt
unless you have a mousepad the size of a pillow, that's way too freaking high. "average" sens at even the most basic of competitive fps levels is considered about 30 cm/1 foot per 360, slow paced games like cs are frequently lower, fast paced games like quake/ut are occasionally higher. it's all a matter of playstyle and preference, but i have no idea how you can accurately headshot with such a ridiculous sens (maybe you're bad at cs?)

On May 16 2007 17:48 JimBobRay wrote:
I have mine cranked up to max on a 800 dpi mouse and although I can move fast across the screen (3-4 cm, I estimate, maybe less) my accuracy is low - I have a hard time selecting peons in the beginning, misclicking and hitting 2 at once. (I am not sure how that even happens sometimes...)

On May 16 2007 18:57 infinity21 wrote:

I bought my Razer because it's a good brand. Its design is superior to most (if not all) mouse manufacturers.

On May 16 2007 18:57 infinity21 wrote:

I bought my Razer because it's a good brand. Its design is superior to most (if not all) mouse manufacturers. I've experimented with all sorts of different speeds from max (1600) to about 400. Interestingly enough, I found that I play better on 400 than I do on 1600. But I ended up settling at around 800.

You don't buy mice just for the DPI. You buy it for the ergonomics, the quality, the feel.

btw my mouse is set to 1000 Hz ~_~

On May 17 2007 12:24 infinity21 wrote:



I wasn't aware that a mouse's full potential only included its DPI. -__-
This is a response to that particular statement.

On May 17 2007 14:54 davidgurt wrote:
Oh, another comment. If you're playing Starcraft, you really don't need more than 800 DPI. It's different for other games.

On May 17 2007 15:23 Zanno wrote:
all the quality sensors just happen to be high dpi though, cheap mice tend to have other problems with skipping, negative acceleration (when you move a mouse so fast it can't keep up and caps off the speed) and generally unreliable tracking

negative accel is hugely prevalent virtually all mice that ship with a new pc, when i visit my parents for the weekend i can't play sc with my their mouse at all, i try to whip my mouse around a bunch in a battle requiring heavy heavy micro and i end up only halfway there or sometimes in a totally different direction. my diamondback doesn't have these sort of problems, it goes where i tell it to

On May 17 2007 17:12 infinity21 wrote:

No, english is not my first language but I don't know how that has to do with anything since I spent 8 years in Canada. I'm pretty sure you don't know what I'm saying so I'll explain further. The original poster (or anyone else, for that matter) could be buying mice not based on DPI but based on all those things I described. They can't CHANGE the shape, quality, and the feel of a mouse but they can BUY the mouse that they like best. I'm responding to the buying part of your statement, not the potential part.

In other words, you ask why people bother to buy a mouse if they're not using it to their full potential. I say people buy it because of shape, quality, and feel. Yes, we're discussing this in a DPI thread but I don't see why I am forbidden to talk about a closely related subject.


Anyways, at least in SC, DPI makes very little or no difference past 800. It's just the quality of the sensor that makes the difference. Many people can play at the pro level with 800 DPI. So I don't see why you think that you must play with 2000 if you have a 2000 DPI mouse. People can just buy it because they like the ergonomics and use it at 800 DPI. What's wrong with that?

edit: w/e this is pointless.. let's drop it, ok?

Anyways, at least in SC, DPI makes very little or no difference past 800. It's just the quality of the sensor that makes the difference.

On May 16 2007 15:06 ilovezil wrote:


I set the window's built-in mouse feature to fastest in order to supplement the 1600 DPI feature my mouse is capable of. I'm curious what 2000 would be like, though.

On May 17 2007 22:41 davidgurt wrote:
I didn't know the sensor is better if you use 2000 DPI.

On May 17 2007 22:56 Zanno wrote:


laser mice are horrible, never buy one

On May 16 2007 18:45 Equinox_kr wrote:
2000 DPI on my Logitech G5 :O

Works well

On May 18 2007 03:59 CubEdIn wrote:
Well as far as I know, some razers have adjustable sensitivity both from the razer software AND the windows pannel. Logitech setpoint is directly related to windows sensitivity, so it does not. But other than that, and DPI, I don't have any idea about other speed settings.

The USB connection speed is also shown on boxes, so you see things like ULTRA FAST 1000Hz USB SPEED for lighting fast response.

So the only speed settings apart from sensitivity settings is the DPI setting. And yes, some logitech mice have specialised buttons, as I described earlier. Reducing dpi from 1600 to 800 for example, is like changing your sensitivity to half of what it actually is.

On May 16 2007 15:20 Zanno wrote:
i use a razer diamondback at 1600 dpi with no drivers and the windows speed slider set at three notches (default is 6) in 1280x1024 it takes me about 10 cm to move across the screen.

in fps games people talk about cm/360 which is the length you need to move the mouse to rotate 360 degrees, i often wonder what pros use for cm/screen. any wanna grab a ruler and measure? sens is often heavily dependent on mouse make and how the cpu feels like interpeting things, two identical sens on will rarely be the same unless the two comps are the same model