Let's Talk About Gaming Mice

[ViciousXUSMC]

Not asking for recommendations, not talking about specific mice. Let's dive deep into mouse functions and capabilities and see what we can dig up together.

I feel there is a ton of dark marketing going around to sell you products that are not any better than what we had 4 years ago for half the price.

Things like high DPI claims, twin sensors, polling rate, etc.

Lets find out for real what is important on the mouse, and what the real life effects of some of these marketing claims are, and then perhaps when we have a solid baseline we can start to put together a list of the "real best mice" and not just go find one with a shiny logo and expensive price and assume it is best.


I'll start off with some of my own knowledge and some articles I know of.

Firstly is mouse DPI

Spoiler :

DPI is simply short dots per inch, I have never needed a mouse with more dpi than my MX518 set to between 1200-1600dpi, I have owned mice with 5700dpi and saw no benefit to it.

Why you ask? Well if you imagine 1600 dots taking up an inch of space the amount of space between those dots is so small that your not even humanly capable of making volentary phisical movements that small, you have no aditional accuracy to gain.

Also if you were to map your mouse input 1:1 to your actual input on your computer 1 "dot" would equal 1 pixel. @ 1600DPI you would scroll 1600 pixels aka your entire monitor pretty much in just a single inch of movement with your mouse. Nobody here uses a sensitivity setting that high and as a result what you do is in windows, or in your games you turn down the sensitivity of your mouse scroll. You suddenly tell your computer 1 dot (is not) 1 pixel, instead say 2 dots = 1 pixel so you cut the effective dpi of your mouse in half.

You may have that mouse set to 5700dpi but trust me, your not using it. Also in order to get that large number there is a very real chance that the mouse company forced it at the cost of accuracy, error correction, and they may even be using interpolation to falsify it and double the actual real life dpi.

So with that said I never buy a mouse based on DPI and I hope that you will not either.

Next is Polling Rate

Spoiler :

This is another new stat mouse companies are proud to boast. 1000mhz polling is king of gaming. That is... 1000 times per second the mouse is polled for updates in position change, aka 1 millisecond.

I agree higher is better, however we reach a point of limited returns much past 500mhz and from that point on again forcing it so high could actually have worse effects than what you have to gain, it may be too much for your usb buss to handle without errors, and some mice even seem to get tracking issues when its too high.

So get something thats in that 400mb+ area but dont make it a requirement that it has 1000mhz polling.

Now how about Sensor Types?

Spoiler :

Seems all the high end mice are now laser (or even twin sensor... but that piece of junk has plenty of articles on google for you) and I think the move to laser was due to the for mentioned DPI race. Laser can boast much higher DPI much easier, but is it actually better than optical?

In my personal experience, no its not. I have yet to come across a laser mouse that could track as good or on as many surfaces as a optical sensor could. Since we already know that DPI is not important I find myself no reason to move to laser. I have not had any laser mouse since the Razer Mamba so maybe it has gotten better since, I am not sure but I can say for sure you have nothing to fear or to avoid with a optical sensor mouse.

More mini articles to come...

For now here is a list of other material on the web with similar information. Go forth and enlighten yourself.

- The Truthful Mouse Guide

- OCN Mouse Reference Thread

- I am looking for an old article that went into a ton of detail about the MX518, talked about error correction, sensor accuracy. It brought up a lot of details that showed it to be the best mouse of its time even when other mice were boasting much higher figures.


My first debate topic:
This guys review of the CM Spawn cm spawn review - YouTube @ 0:55 he talks about tracking rates. This guy is supposed to be a mouse expert I guess and he says the mouse works better at 125hz polling rate. I want to know what his reasoning for this is and if its true. I know that 1000hz is overkill and not needed, but I cant see how he came up with the math on DPI+Polling Rate = Tracking Rate and why he says lower is better.

I sent him a message to ask where he gets his numbers from and what his reasoning is lets hope he gets back with me.

More to come for this main post, just getting it started to now. Let me know if you have any information to add, be it your own or articles on the net and of course post a reply to discuss.

[Mastershroom]

I'll copy and paste an old post I made on the subject of mice, DPI and how it matters, and the distinction between DPI and sensitivity (spoiler alert - they're not the same).

When it comes to adjusting your mouse's sensitivity and DPI to be comfortable for you, you're actually supposed to keep the Windows sensitivity at the default 6th notch out of the 11 in the cursor speed bar, and adjust DPI and game settings accordingly.

The way Windows works with mouse sensitivity, that 6th/11 notch gives you 1:1 tracking, and using a higher or lower sensitivity basically applies a multiplier to your mouse's "natural" sensitivity. For example, at 3/11 bars, you have a 0.25x multiplier, meaning your cursor only responds once every 4 points of movement. Naturally, 6/11 notch sensitivity with high DPI yields crazy mouse speed, so you'll probably want to use a lower DPI for the Windows desktop. I'm personally comfortable at 1,800 DPI, and I prefer 800 with my large mouse pad.

Frankly, DPI in mice these days is highly overrated; you can calculate the minimum necessary DPI to be able to turn one pixel at a time at a given sensitivity. For example, with a 9-inch 360 (medium-low sensitivity), the minimum useful DPI to be able to aim to an accuracy of one pixel is about 580 DPI. Any less than this, and you'll end up skipping pixels because the mouse doesn't have enough data to send to provide pixel-precise movement at such a sensitivity.

While you may get the exact same sensitivity in inches per 360 degree turn with a high DPI/low sensitivity and low DPI/high sens configuration, the former will be more accurate, because the latter will likely have DPI lower than the minimum necessary for single-pixel precision.

This means that high-sensitivity players benefit more from higher-DPI mice than low-sensitivity players. However, the DPI of most mice these days are still way more than enough for even high-sensitivity players. Take a 3-inch 360 for example; by just about any standards that's pretty high sensitivity. The minimum useful DPI to be able to maintain single-pixel precision is around 1,800. Significantly higher than that of a low-sensitivity player, but still within the scope of just about any gaming-grade mouse these days; even the original 2007 DeathAdder had 1,800 DPI, as does the old-but-good Logitech MX518.

Now let's take it to extremes: a one-inch 360 degree turn. That's pretty insanely high sensitivity; just about uselessly high, actually. A brief flick of the wrist can rotate you around several times. The minimum DPI for such a ridiculous sensitivity is around 5,400, which exceeds the capability of all but the highest-end gaming mice like the Logitech G500 and G700 (5,700 DPI) and the Razer Mamba, Naga, Lachesis and Imperator (5,600 DPI).

So, higher DPI has its uses, although primarily for high-sensitivity gamers, and even low-mid grade gaming mice usually have more DPI than you'll ever need.

tl;dr - the ideal combination is 6/11 Windows mouse cursor speed setting, low DPI on your desktop to your own preference for cursor speed. As for your in-game DPI setting, as long as it exceeds the minimum DPI for your desired sensitivity, you're set, and you can adjust the in-game sensitivity setting to compensate. If you're a medium to low sensitivity gamer, you can use the same relatively low DPI that you use for your desktop for your gaming, as it will still exceed the minimum DPI for maximum precision.

As for polling (or report) rate, that's basically how often the mouse sends data via USB to your computer. Your average mouse does this 125 times per second (125Hz), which means 1/125th of a second, i.e. 8/1000's of a second (8ms) per poll. This means the mouse takes 8ms to respond. Gaming-grade mice are typically capable of 1,000Hz polling, meaning each poll takes only 1ms. Basically, you should always use the highest polling rate your mouse is capable of to minimize input lag. This does have a higher toll on your CPU, but the effect is negligible if you're not running your mouse through a TI-83 calculator.

This is an excellent link with some handy tools for calculating your sensitivity in inches (or centimeters) per 360-degree rotation, and your minimum useful DPI for a given sensitivity. The "in-game sensitivity" entry is based on the sensitivity scale for games based on id Tech 3 and its derivatives, including Source. So your sensitivity in Counter-Strike or TF2 or any CoD game will work.

worthless information about your worthless mouse

One last protip: Source engine games (TF2, CS:S, L4D/L4D2) have an option for "raw input" in the mouse settings, which I highly recommend enabling. This basically allows the game to read input data directly from your mouse rather than filtering it through Window's settings.

Oh, and whatever you do, make sure mouse acceleration is disabled!

Sorry for the wall of text, but I hope you all find this useful.

[ViciousXUSMC]

Here are a couple of tools to disable mouse acceleration, I always have it off. I turned it off on the work computers too and it drives everybody nuts

How to Disable Mouse Acceleration

http://www.hardcoreware.net/files/mouse_fix.reg

GotFrag eSports - Files - CPL Mouse Fix

GameBanana: CPL Mouse Fix (Tools > Counter-Strike: 1.6 > Client Modification > CPL Mouse Fix)

Be sure you use the right fix for the right OS, some are older and for XP, while there are newer ones for Vista/7

Here is an article all about setting up mouse sensitivity: CS:S Mouse Optimization Guide

[DEagleson]

My Performance MX is configured to only use SetPoint, skipping whatever the OS wants and also i disabled Mouse Accelleration.

When its at 1500dpi it behaves just like i want it to on a 1920x1080 screen.
And it tracks perfectly on my glass desktop, but i use a mousepad because glass gets so cold. brr

[masterchef341]

Originally Posted by Mastershroom

As for polling (or report) rate, that's basically how often the mouse sends data via USB to your computer. Your average mouse does this 125 times per second (125Hz), which means 1/125th of a second, i.e. 8/1000's of a second (8ms) per poll. This means the mouse takes 8ms to respond. Gaming-grade mice are typically capable of 1,000Hz polling, meaning each poll takes only 1ms. Basically, you should always use the highest polling rate your mouse is capable of to minimize input lag. This does have a higher toll on your CPU, but the effect is negligible if you're not running your mouse through a TI-83 calculator.

If polling occurs every 8 ms, it would actually take some amount of time between 0 - 8 ms. Technically, the transmission itself would take some time as well, but that time should be small.

on average it would take 4 ms

[Mastershroom]

And how did you arrive at that conclusion?

[jrwingate6]

I understand why you think that laser technology is no better than optical if the last laser mouse you used was the Mamba. No offense to the Mamba but I returned it due to tracking issues and it just not feeling right with my grip. When you say that optical can track on more surfaces that simply is not true. My last Logitech mouse (MX Performance) could track on glass. I never had a optical mouse that was capable of doing that. My current mouse (G700) has so far tracked on everything I've tried and it by far has the best sensor I've ever used.

By saying that companies just switched to laser in order to win the DPI race is pure speculation. Companies like Logitech use lasers in a lot of their high end mice, not just the gaming mice. In my experience, (owning 8 different mice over the past decade), I've found that laser mice are more precise. In my opinion, manufacturers switched to laser technology because it is better.

[saturnotaku]

Originally Posted by jrwingate6

In my experience, (owning 8 different mice over the past decade), I've found that laser mice are more precise. In my opinion, manufacturers switched to laser technology because it is better.

If laser were truly better, optical mice would have been eliminated years ago.

I've owned at least the same number of mice as you in less than 1/2 the time, but until just a couple weeks ago, I kept coming back to the Logitech MX518 because it does absolutely everything a mouse should do. No gimmicks, great response and tracking. I would be buried with it, but unfortunately Logitech doesn't see the value in releasing software for its gaming mice that's compatible with OS X. As much crap as I give Razer, the DeathAdder (another optical mouse ) works great, with only one tweak that need be applied to have tracking that basically mimics what I can achieve on the Windows side.

[jrwingate6]

Originally Posted by saturnotaku

If laser were truly better, optical mice would have been eliminated years ago.

I've owned at least the same number of mice as you in less than 1/2 the time, but until just a couple weeks ago, I kept coming back to the Logitech MX518 because it does absolutely everything a mouse should do. No gimmicks, great response and tracking. I would be buried with it, but unfortunately Logitech doesn't see the value in releasing software for its gaming mice that's compatible with OS X. As much crap as I give Razer, the DeathAdder (another optical mouse ) works great, with only one tweak that need be applied to have tracking that basically mimics what I can achieve on the Windows side.

Notice how I said "In my opinion"? Yes, manufacturers are still making optical mice because it is the cheaper technology. You usually see Laser technology in the high end mice. Optical sensors are used in mid to low end mice. I'm sure optical mice still work great and I'm sure some people don't see a difference between the two but "IN MY OPINION", laser sensors just feel more precise and provide better tracking (as long as the sensor isn't some cheap POS). Look at all of Logitech's high end mice and not just the gaming ones. They all use laser technology. Some of them even use lasers that have no problem tracking on glass like the one I used to own. You don't see optical sensors tracking on glass.

Logitech doesn't see the value in OSX software for Gaming Mice because the market just isn't there. I don't know anyone who purchases a Mac with gaming in mind. I'm sure people do game with their Macs but the numbers are a very tiny fraction of the people who are gaming on Windows. If Logitech saw the value in developing OSX software for it's gaming mice then I'm sure they would have done it already.

[redrazor11]

I think some perspective is important to keep in mind. Even though some gaming mice offer greater control, comfort, and/or function...it's no magic bullet.

Don't expect, for example, +10% accuracy in (insert favorite FPS). Such increases are only found through personal skill development.