I’ve talked to a lot of gamers that don’t understand mouse acceleration and how it impacts accuracy in all genre’s of gaming. They think buying a $100 mouse is the magic bullet to being a leet gamer. Meanwhile they’re running mouse acceleration with terrible DPI settings because they don’t understand why their 5000 yard sniper shots are missing. I decided to write a little something about this as it’s a pretty big point in gaming that many people have no idea about. My main competitive game on PC is Starcraft II and accuracy of clicking units and selecting things can be a huge concern and while it’s very important in RTS games to be accurate, understanding it really derives from the FPS community where mouse control is one of the most defining elements of good play.

Don’t accelerate me bro’

Mouse acceleration is a “feature” in most operating systems and in many games that makes the mouse cursor move across the screen faster if you move your mouse faster. The problem with this is that it creates inconsistency in the control of your mouse. If you move your mouse half an inch, you try to commit to memory at that equals in cursor movement on the screen. The breakdown in this process is with mouse acceleration; this distance varies based on the speed at which you moved the mouse. This is obviously a big problem as good control relies heavily on muscle memory and that’s impossible if you’re constantly having to re-evaluate and adjust the cursor due to inconsistent mouse control.

My DPI is bigger than your DPI…

No, cranking up your DPI to 3000 on your gaming mouse with mouse acceleration is not going to make you king nerd. In fact, poor configuration of your mouse cursor speed combined with acceleration is the perfect storm for bad play.

Many people think of DPI in relation to print. When dealing with mouse DPI, it’s essentially resolution in counts per inch. This is in conflict to the “pointer speed” option you see in the Windows control panel or mouse driver. The “pointer speed” option you find in the control panel is actually a large issue, similar to acceleration. Many gamers crank this up thinking, that if they can move the mouse faster, they’ll be better than their opponent.

What they don’t realize is by increasing this value it causes the operating system to start skipping pixels in order to speed up the mouse cursor. This causes inaccuracy because of mouse stepping. You can see this by opening up MS Paint, setting the mouse speed up higher and drawing some circle. You’ll see rigid lines for the curves that look like little “steps”. This is the mouse skipping pixels to compensate for the faster mouse speed since the DPI value has not changed.

Get it right!

1. First of all, go into the Windows control panel and disable “Enhanced Pointer Precision”. This “mostly” disables mouse acceleration. Windows has some acceleration natively build into it, to finish fixing it, you can download this small .EXE file that will make the necessary registry fixes. If you’re not comfortable using a .EXE file from here, you can Google search the registry values to edit manually if you prefer.
2. Set the pointer speed to the default value which is the 6th “notch” in the Windows Mouse control panel. This sets the mouse speed to a 1:1 ratio so that there is no pixel skipping/stepping.
3. Now that you’ve removed the software acceleration from your mouse and made sure you’re not getting any stepping you can adjust the DPI of the mouse with the build in drivers like Logitech Setpoint to the needed “speed” for quick movement and accuracy. I personally use about 1200 DPI. This value will vary depending on what resolution you play at.
4. Some games have mouse acceleration built into them which sucks. Usually there is either some type of console or configuration edit you can make to get rid of it. Google it. It can take some getting used to if you’ve been playing with mouse acceleration for a long time but you’ll improve after a while.
5. The final step that I’m still working on; stop being bad at the game you’re trying to play. That’s it.