Use different profile for win

You mean in mouse software? I'm using a zowie mouse.

Not on modern mice, but some older mice that use sensors like the 3090, 3050 etc have higher max tracking speeds at 400-800 DPI.

It shouldn't matter if you're using the 3310 sensor. Some people will say 400-800 feels snappier, or less prone to jitter etc. Or they are just used to the "feel" of it. But I think thats down to personal preference, if you want to use a higher DPI, and as long as you're using a more modern sensor, it shouldn't cause any issues. Its actually better, if you have a higher sensitivity, to use a higher DPI. If you try a very high sensitivity at 400 DPI, you'll see the crosshair skips around. All higher DPI does is allow you to have that same high sensitivity (same cm/360), but with the ability to move the crosshair in smaller increments.

Myth. That does not apply in 3D games as far as I know.

Try it yourself in QL:
400 DPI, sens 20
1600 DPI, sens 5
See the difference?
(ofc no one uses that sens but it shows it more clearly at higher sens)

To quote the man himself, injx, who undoubtedly knows more about this than anyone else on esreality

There is no such thing as 'pixel skipping' in first person shooters.

Pixel skipping only exists for 2D mouse pointers such as the windows desktop pointer. In that case if you lower the screen resolution, you reduce the density of states that the pointer can occupy, and thus reduce the available precision for pointing at stuff. Pixels are macroscopic states - you want to be able to point at each one, so skipping over pixels is bad.

However in 3D games where the mouse controls rotation, the rotations are performed in degrees, not pixels. It doesn't matter whether you are using a 1080p or a 1x1 pixel blob, the game will respond in exactly the same way to your input. The mouse input code doesn't even know or care about what is on your screen.

So the screen resolution only affects the visual detail of the player's view of the world, not his control of it.

You *can* use the screen resolution as a basis for estimating how much mouse dpi is 'useful' for your setup - this is something that both Sujoy and myself have formulated in the past. But these estimations are not magic numbers and you certainly shouldn't lower the quality of your setup to try and match these estimations. They are useful for debunking the gaming mice "you need 9000dpi to be pro" myth in a quantitative fashion.

tl;dr: "pixel skipping" is not a valid reason for deliberately choosing a low resolution over a high one in 3D games. The precision of control is unaffected, only the visual detail changes.

http://www.esreality.com/index.php?a=post&id=2047257

He's talking about something different (screen res).

He's right that you don't get pixel skipping in 3D games, but what can happen is you get less increments in 360 degrees, from using too low of a DPI for your cm/360.

Like I said, try it yourself, you'll see it.

bst is right, sensitivity in-game is just a factor of how many pixels to re-orient your screen per mouse report

When you move your mouse in an FPS game, there will be a smallest possible view angle change. The higher your sens setting, the bigger this angle will be. You can use a smaller sens setting by increasing mouse DPI and, therefore, get a smaller minimum view angle change. This is obviously something, if it benefits anyone at all, that will benefit high sens users.

While technically you are rotating by a certain number of degrees (an angle), when that rotation occurs, your crosshair will move from what it is currently pointing at to pointing at something else. That something else will exist at a certain number of pixels away from what you were originally looking at. If this number of pixels is large, perhaps skipping will be apparent, in exactly the same way as skipping can be apparent on the desktop. You can only really argue that the skipping would be obscured by the fact every pixel on the screen changes rather than just those concerning your desktop cursor.

To give an example:
If I'm running on a 1920x1080 screen with a real horizontal FOV of 106.2 (QL cg_fov 90), m_yaw 0.022 (default), DPI 400, sens 20.78 (making my sens 5cm / 360 in this high sens user example), then the minimum rotation I can make is 0.46 degrees.

With that minimum rotation, what I will be looking at after the rotation is almost 6 pixels to the left or right of what I'm currently looking at. Whether such high granularity is actually apparent to a player would require some kind of double blind testing. :D
But it does sound high. On my 27" screen, pixels are huge (0.3mm wide) at this res.

At the risk of possibly offending you I believe 5cm/360 is not only extremely inconsistent but entirely detrimental to accuracy and movement. Anything negative that allegedly happens at this kind of sens is pointless to talk about given the obvious drawbacks. 5cm/360 is absurdly fast.

It's okay. I'm not offended. :D

I deliberately chose an absurdly fast sens (that is still in the range of what people use) because it is at higher sens values that such high DPIs are most likely to benefit anyone.

It's to demonstrate a point, not to recommend that kind of sens for actual use.

But yeah, some people do use such sens, believe it or not.

Working out what DPI would be needed for such a sens, as I have done in comment #26, just gives us an idea of what the upper bound on useful DPI might be.

If I halve the sens in my example (10cm is definitely used by very good players out there), it more or less halves the number of pixels to 3. Still pretty bad.

OK. Thanks for good answer.

This depends on one major factor. If the sensor is designed for 400/800 but scaled up to advertise incredibly high DPIs, say 4000, to people who don't know any better then it is better to use 400/800. You might not run into any problems using 4000 DPI with the sensor but it will have noise and technically inferior tracking. Depending on the circumstances it may or may not change your gaming performance. Still, there is no advantage to using the higher DPI, so you might as well use the native DPI. Also I think it is impossible to design a mouse that fits into your hand but has a native DPI of something like 4000 because the mouse would have to be 2x or 3x physically larger for such a sensor. Bottom line using the native DPI is practically always better as higher ones don't necessarily have any advantages.

Thanks.

there's no such thing as "native dpi" in mice using "very" modern sensors, like 3310/3360/3366.

on razer mice i'm not sure tho

There's no such thing as a 3310/3360/3366 DPI mouse.

no heartless wasnt saying there are those dpi, just that it is not native in newer ones.

The DPI a mouse is advertised as is the maximum DPI the sensor is capable of. They are in reality 400-800 DPI.

When Heartless said "3310/3360/3366", he was referring to the model numbers of sensors used in a range of modern gaming mice.

Okay thanks.

The problem is that no one tells the real DPI, only the maximum from driver point. Lately razer advertised their latest deathadder as native over 9000 dpi sensor... bullshit :/

Lately razer advertised their latest deathadder as native over 9000 dpi sensor...

does that mean any dpi step is native ?

i mean with current and new sensors, isn't it supposed to not have any native dpi step, actually ?

I'm not sure how it couldn't have a native step. I mean, the sensor is basically a tiny low resolution camera made of pixels. The native DPI would be determined by the size of those pixels unless there is some magic going on that I'm missing here.

yes but i heard on the newest sensors (3310 3360 3366) all dpi steps are fine, unlike for example on "old" razer mice where native dpi was 1800

i might be wrong tho, i don't know, that's why i'm asking :D

Yep, it's a mystery.

What we really need is benchmarks to see how much increasing the DPI causes problems in the various metrics they obviously have for assessing sensor performance.

I'm gonna guess that up to 2000 DPI is just fine. I haven't noticed any noise with it.

Even if 400 DPI is good enough for an FPS game, it kinda sucks on the desktop.

Heartless, will you change sensitivity/setup any for quake chapions? I seems quite a bit slower. Or is it too soon to tell with some latency problems in beta?

Heartless, will you change sensitivity/setup any for quake chapions?

nop ;), the only thing i might chance, but not for the moment, is my GFX card (currently GTX 970, might buy 1070 later)

All the new mouses have quite capable processors in them that calculates everything, so there won't be any difference no matter the dpi set. It's just preference what combination of dpi and sens one would choose.

Native 9,000 DPI would be something like:

36x36 matrix, focused in on an area the size of 4 mil, or about 0.1mm. Its possible I guess, I don't really know... the datasheets never go into that much detail :(

10000 to be exact. Dunno how it can be native on that senzor size. Guess it's not direct meaning and only razer knows

You're over-analysing way too much, go by pure "feel" and don't think too much about the technical aspect.

You preferance could be 400, 800, 1600 or beyond it really all depends on you as the individual what allows you to aim and move to the best of your ability.

Here is some simple logic :

if you're using very low sens then use low dpi (400-500dpi)
if you're using med sens then use med dpi (800-1000dpi)
if you're using high sens then use high dpi (1600-2000dpi)
if you're using ultra high sens (agent-like-@-5cm/360°) then use very high dpi (anything higher than 4000dpi is useless tho, even with 4K monitors)

I personally use high dpi (1600dpi@1000hz) because my sens is 13cm/360°, and high sens is somewhere between 10cm and 15cm.
Also my Zowie by benQ ZA11 has 3310 sensor, so as bst said, I can use high dpi just fine.

annnnnd... it feels much better @ windows & mobas/RTS games @1080p.

You can calculate it too.

If m_yaw is 0.022, divide 360 by it and you get 16363. That's the amount of increments available at sens of 1.

So sens 4 gives you 360/(4x0.022)= 4090

Sens 16 gives you 1000 or so.

DPI just becomes IPI, increments per inch. So at sens 16, 1000 DPI is 1 inch for a 360. If you want more increments, you have to use a lower sensitivity and a higher DPI, eg sens 4, 4000 DPI, or sens 1, 16000 DPI.

I think 4000 increments is fine, but something like 1000 isn't. You don't really need 16000 though.

So maybe a good rule is, don't go above sens 5, increase your DPI instead. Then you'll never have too few increments. Like if you're using sens 10, it's probably better to halve your sens and double your DPI.

What DPI would you recommend for 19.8cm/360? If it really matters though.

So its about 8 inches/360.

You could probably use 400 DPI, but 800 would be smoother, especially when zoomed in. The increments would work out like this:
400 DPI x 8 inches = 3200 increments
800 DPI x 8 inches = 6400

So you'd just use whatever sens 19.8 cm/360 works out at on 800 DPI and it would give you plenty of increments (roughly 6400).

I've never actually tested to find out what the minimum increments should be, but I just know when you start to get around 2000 it starts becoming noticeable. But you'd have to use like 200 DPI with your cm/360 to get that amount, so probably never going to happen.

I'll just chip in and say it depends on your FOV and resolution, but I wouldn't go less than 600 DPI unless I had some brain-damaged mouse that needed it to function correctly.

Lower FOV is going to magnify the inaccuracies, and lower resolution hide them.

My rationale: the vague notion I should be able to move the crosshair "one pixel".

At QL cg_fov 90 and 1920x1080 and your mouse sens, I need approximately 578 DPI to do that.

Probably best to work out your minimum DPI from your zoomed fov, since thats where the effect is magnified.

But resolution doesn't really come into it, what you see on screen is only a representation of the crosshair position, in the game its exactly the same, whether you're at low res or high res.

But there is no reason to use the minimum DPI, its only a reference you shouldn't go below. You can use higher and it shouldn't cause any major issues, as long as your mouse can handle it.

Zoom alg might clean that up in QL, however fucked the alg is in widescreen.

As far as I'm aware, the zoom algorithm in QL works fine.

The only real problem with it is that by default, it aims to preserve the feel of flicks equal to the distance between the centre of your screen and the top of the screen at the expense of the feel of every other type of distance.

When you're zooming, you're not usually doing flicks like that, so preserving the feel of smaller distances is better IMO.

This can be achieved by setting cg_zoomSensitivity to less than 1 though it is not the most intuitive setting in the world.

For instance, if my cg_fov is 100 and cg_zoomfov 60, and I wanna preserve flicks of 10% of the "4:3 screen width that lives inside my 16:9 screen" instead of the default 75%, I would need to set cg_zoomSensitivity to 0.868.

Yeah, I could calculate it for zoomed in. What zoomfov should I use? The scaling of sens due to zoom would probably make it kinda similar.

Personally, I see no reason not to just crank up the DPI to like 2000 or so and lower sens anyway because I don't feel any jitter. Working out the minimum is purely academic. :D

The DPI setting isn't really about having more accurate aiming directly. It is more about having the game look smooth, which may help aim indirectly or at least make the player more comfortable.

What I mean by that is that you can technically hit everything just fine with a pretty high granularity if you move your mouse right, but the smoothness you get from the lower granularity may help the brain make those correct mouse movements.

Lower resolution will make those smoothness improvements less apparent, so in that sense, it hides the benefits of increasing DPI.

I mean if my res is so low that the angle change does not even cause an object to shift by one pixel, I'm not really getting much benefit from it. That kind of small angle change on low res is probably just gonna cause textures and aliasing to render a little different.

If we want to be really pedantic, let's do the previous calculation for some kind of extreme scenario.

Resolution: 1920x1080
cg_fov: 90
cg_zoomfov: 40
m_yaw: 0.022
cm / 360: 5
normal zoom scaling factor: 0.414117549
cm / 360 when zoomed: 12.073866495

When not zoomed:
DPI needed for object to move by one pixel at very edge of screen: 6379
DPI needed for object to move by one pixel at centre of screen: 2298

When zoomed:
DPI needed for object to move by one pixel at very edge of screen: 3230
DPI needed for object to move by one pixel at centre of screen: 2615

Correct me if I'm wrong anywhere. Easy to muck this up.

If I've got it right, even in this extreme example, 2000-3000 DPI seems adequate.

Actually I forgot about the sens scaling with zoom since I don't use it :D It always felt a bit weird to me in quake. I meant if you had sens 10 @ 400 DPI but lowered it to sens 5 @ 800 DPI, then it'd probably be ok for unzoomed, but when you zoom in with the same sens, you notice the blockyness of the aiming, so based on that you'd probably want sens 2.5 @ 1600 DPI.

Yeah, at a certain point, its just smoothness for the sake of smoothness. You don't really need it to aim well. As long as you can move your xhair in small enough increments, its ok.

Like if you had sens 10 @ 400 DPI, you might miss some shot where you're trying to aim through a tiny gap, and the xhair will only go either side of the gap. If you just change it to sens 2.5 @ 1600 then it'll be fine.

The thing about low res, is it depends how low the res is, if its 320x240 then you're probably better off not relying on the pixels, because they're so huge. But like most of this stuff it only really applies at extremes.. no ones using that res, I hope not anyway, lol.

Aren't you that guy who took everyone's money for the Aurora mouse?

800-1600

This is all nonsense... you should use the DPI your mouse functions best at. There is something called Shannon's Law, which I believe some people here are referencing, but using it to satisfy mouse settings would mean Rapha, the most decorated Quake player of all time, has bad settings. Obviously this has not hindered him at winning QuakeCon repeatedly. So why would it matter to any of us?

And if your mouse operates fine at all DPIs? Which DPI then? Why choose 400 over something that provides better performance even if it doesn't really help you play better?

The only real myth, or legacy, floating around is that there is some sort of magic about 400 DPI.

I don't think anyone is claiming it makes huge differences to player performance. It's the same sort of reason people get all kinds of improvements in their hardware that probably don't make big differences in their performance.

In any case, being good at Quake doesn't necessarily mean you know more than what you've been told by others about settings, and rapha's sens isn't high anyway, about 21 cm / 360, last I heard.

Your mouse almost certainly does not operate fine at all DPIs. Scaling up from the base DPI causes noise and technically inferior tracking. It may or may not be noticeable in general play but it's there. Also the malfunction speed is typically lower when you leave the DPI the sensor was designed for. This is still a problem with modern mice like the g100 where fast flicks may cause malfunction.

I would have to see proof of that for a particular sensor.

I know what you're saying is true for some older mice, but is that still true for the modern sensors praised by all that heartless mentioned?

When the datasheets for these sensors report 12,000DPI, what am I supposed to assume the sensor was designed for?

Anyway, this is not a question of DPI then, but rather a question of getting a sensor without these flaws. My comments are based on the assumption of the mouse being able to provide that DPI properly.

Approximately 3 minutes in explained by François Moriers senior engineer at Logitech:

Is Logitech trying to sell WMOs with this video? :D

Jokes aside, it's a good video.

I'm not sure why a mouse would have to be as huge as he says to have a high pixel resolution on the sensor.

Now, the real question becomes at what point does the signal to noise ratio become a bigger problem than the low DPI? :D

When we're talking less than 2000 DPI, how big is this problem? We need benchmarks. He talks about all these metrics, so they must be measuring them. :D

They know for sure, maybe don't want to tell, they have to sell 12-16k dpi mouse for marketing, but like iso for cameras, there is a point data become unusable.
Except you are playing on 4k panel, 2000dpi should be enough

Yeah, I only use 1800 DPI.

The problems with my game come from me, not the mouse. :D

What do you mean too slow in Windows?

Slow mouse cursor on the desktop, I assume.

...but.... increase Windows sens in that case...? :S

If you do that, you lose the ability to hit every pixel on the screen.

That's not so bad in very high res, but I don't think it is good in 1080p or less. Ideally windows sens is always at the 6/11 notch.

With 400 DPI, you probably need "Enhance pointer precision" enabled.

is there any community more well-informed and willing to share knowledge? <3

Surely Shirley there is not!

And if there is.....they need to come over here and absolve into us.

if they come over here, they're going to have to do it legally. we're going to have a post queue, and it's going to have a big, beautiful approval button, and sujoy is going to pay for it. because he's brown.

some games have very big minimum edpi steps (in game sensitivity).
in that case lower dpi can set your edpi more precisely.

Those games are retarded. :D