Get your mouse set up for success
We reveal what the specs mean and what to adjust mouse performance and feel.
The most obvious specification that gaming mice manufacturers like to push is the DPI, or dots per inch. In the old days, mice used a ball that connected to twin rollers to measure movement, but this has since been replaced by a light and camera. As the mouse moves, the camera takes hundreds if not thousands of pictures per second, checking to see where the mouse light has moved. The DPI measures just how many shots are taken. Increase the DPI, and the further your mouse will move when you slide it across your mouse pad. Therefore, a higher DPI will react to smaller movements. How high is too high?
It’s usually splashed across the mouse packaging, and most people assume that the higher the DPI, the better the sensor, but this is not always the case. Many mice now offer a DPI of 8,000, and yet, pro-gamers generally set their DPI to no more than 1,200. It can be helpful if you’re running a 4K screen, or three screens, but for a single screen user a high DPI can actually be a hindrance, as the mouse becomes overly sensitive.
Nearly every mouse now comes with a DPI-adjusting button, which allows the users to switch the DPI on the fly while gaming. For example, there’s generally three DPI modes that the user can pre-program. In the example of an FPS player, they may set a 600 DPI mode for ultra-fine accuracy while sniping, 1,000 for general run and gunning, and 1,600 for flying around in vehicles that require wide-ranging mouse movements.
Optical or laser?
Amongst the gaming community, debate is raging about optical versus digital or laser mice. Optical mice shine a red light onto the mouse pad, while laser mice instead use infrared light. According to a recent interview with Chris Pate, of Logitech, “Both optical and laser-illuminated mice use CMOS sensors to take pictures of the surface beneath them, and use those pictures to determine movement”. Laser lights have a different wavelength to the optical lights used in other mice, and looks deeper into the structure of the surface it’s on. However, an optical sensor looks more at the top of the surface, which can make laser lights more sensitive to dips and troughs in your surface, leading to jittering. This is why laser-based mice work better on hard mouse pads — put them on a fabric pad and it picks up too much information, which can lead a phenomenon most gamers call unwanted acceleration. According to Logitech, laser sensors have 5% variation in tracking at different speeds, while optical is below 1%. This is why most serious gamers are making the move back to optical mouse. The issue isn’t actually acceleration — it’s also known as ‘resolution error versus speed’ and ‘speed-related accuracy variance’, but for the purposes of this article, we’ll keep it simple.
Local polling
The other main spec that is promoted is the polling rate — how often the mouse sends data to your PC. Thankfully, basically every mouse on the planet now does this at 1,000Hz, so it’s basically irrelevant. You’ll probably notice that every mouse in our roundup is wired as well, for two reasons. Firstly, wireless mice tend to cost a lot more. Secondly, there’s a perception that they introduce latency between a user’s input and what happens on screen, though several high-end wireless mouse claim this is around 1ms.
Get comfortable
Another key factor that comes into play when buying a mouse is ergonomics — if it doesn’t feel comfortable after hours of play, you’re going to have an unpleasant experience. Claw gamers tend to hold the mouse with the tips of their fingers, while palm gamers wrest their entire palm on the mouse — figure out which one you are, and then buy the optimal shape for your needs. Fingertip gamers tend to hold the mouse with the slightest of touch.
MMOre buttons
Finally, there’s the number of buttons on the mouse. Shooter fans tend to only need four or five, while MMO players can make use of three times that. Again, it comes down to what kind of game you play — choose the one most appropriate for your needs.