Difference between polling rate and DPI in gaming mouse

[haryyray]

Hi, Can anyone please explain the difference between polling rate and DPI. Do high DPI mouse matters a lot for battle royale game. I love to snipe but not an expert.

[Hoonigan]

Polling rate isn't really that important anymore; you'll struggle to find a mouse that doesn't feature a 1000Hz polling rate now.

DPI is just a measure of the maximum resolution the mouse can scan the surface with; though higher isn't always better. Some mice claim to have 16,000 DPI but they may in fact only be capable of 4000 and the rest is interpolation.

I would recommend the Steelseries Rival/Sensei 310 as a good budget mouse with a brilliant sensor.

Roccat mice, with the Owl Eye sensors are also solid options.

[kalniel]

Hi, Can anyone please explain the difference between polling rate and DPI. Do high DPI mouse matters a lot for battle royale game. I love to snipe but not an expert.

Polling rate is the number of times per second that the mouse is asked 'have you moved?' DPI (dots per inch) is the resolution that the sensor claims to be able to image the surface to determine what movement takes place.

As hoonigan says, the polling rate is so high these days that it's kind of irrelevant - your hand is not going to be moving the mouse faster than can be detected. DPI is also mostly over-rated - the higher the DPI the faster the mouse pointer will seem to move. You want it to be fast enough for your needs, but anything faster and you'll end up just turning down the DPI anyway or adding a software layer to reduce the sensitivity, especially if you're a sniper.

Far more important is a good quality sensor (not at all related to the highest DPI) and a reliable driver.

[Corky34]

While i don't disagree with both your explanations of DPI and polling rates wouldn't it be better to have both as high as comfortable while lowering sensitivity? A bit like how it's better to render an image at higher resolutions and downscale it as required.

[Hoonigan]

While i don't disagree with both your explanations of DPI and polling rates wouldn't it be better to have both as high as comfortable while lowering sensitivity? A bit like how it's better to render an image at higher resolutions and downscale it as required.

Polling rate, yes. There's no harm in the mouse updating its position more often, providing the mouse is reasonably new. We've been managing 1000Hz for some time now, so the built in CPUs in modern mice are capable of it without question.

DPI, no. Several sensors degrade their accuracy and performance when the DPI hits a certain percentage of the maximum, some of which can do so as low as about 25%-30% of the maximum. There's a happy medium to be found when setting up sensitivity and DPI. A good quality mouse surface can also help, giving the mouse a decent mat to read from can help massively and you can benefit from the difference in friction, though that's an entirely different conversation.

[Corky34]

I know some manufactures double the DPI of what the sensor is capable of via software but AFAIK that only happens when you go beyond what the sensor is capable of natively, a drop in accuracy at 25-30% of what the sensor is capable of seems rather arbitrary, either a sensor can or can't track movement, if it's losing accuracy at a particular resolution then it's measuring a lower DPI.

I'm not saying the highest DPI is always the best BTW as you get to a point where the resolution exceeds the abilities of the sensor to accurately measure the difference between images and you can get jitter, however that only happens close to the maximum capabilities of the sensor on difficult to read surfaces.

[Zak33]

I would recommend the Steelseries Rival/Sensei 310 as a good budget mouse with a brilliant sensor.

Roccat mice, with the Owl Eye sensors are also solid options.

both excellent suggestions.

[Ice Tea]

Not sure if it applys to Modern Mice but higher settings used to increase CPU and USB bus load with higher checking rates but i'm guessing that's not such a problem with USB 3.0 bandwidth as i've not seen anyone complain about it for years?