Your mouse’s DPI and your in-game mouse sensitivity setting work together to determine
how far you have to move your mouse by… which I will refer to as your mouse’s sensitivity.
…And that’s the most difficult bit of this video to understand. Because I know that
‘mouse sensitivity’ sounds dangerously similar to ‘in-game mouse sensitivity setting’.
But I couldn’t think of a better term for it. The in-game setting for this should instead
be called ‘mouse movement amplifier’, because that’s kind of what it is. So I’ll
refer to it in this video as that! Your mouse’s DPI is kind of like the resolution
of your mouse, as it’s scanning the desk beneath it. The higher it is, the smaller
the movements it can detect, so the less you have to move it to cover the same distance
on-screen. BACK IN MY DAY, mice had balls and cursors moved very slowly. And then there
was a DPI war. It was cool to use 2000. 3000. 4000! DPI. The slightest surprise would send
your character spinning on the spot. High sensitivity was cool! And honestly, I think
I played well with it. But even as a high-sensitivity sympathiser, even I admit that it then got
a bit silly. 6000! 10,000 DPI!!! My mouse right now can do 12,000. Now we’ve gone
full circle and it’s cooler to use lower DPIs and sensitivities again. In fact,
as long as you’ve got a good, accurate optical sensor, I don’t think anybody cares too
much about DPI anymore. It’s all about RGB lighting these days.
But since everybody has different DPI mice, and has different preferred sensitivities,
games have a MOUSE MOVEMENT AMPLIFIER setting, which lets you fine-tune how sensitive your
mouse feels to move. It’s worth remembering that games don’t know what DPI your mouse
is. They just know that a mouse movement is a mouse movement, and that lots of them means
a lot of movement in-game. They don’t know if you’re using 12,000 DPI, or if you’re
simply moving a 1,000 DPI mouse very, very quickly.
And now, with all that explained and out of the way, onto the topic of this video: which
is better, high DPI and low in-game amplification, or low DPI with high in-game amplification?
Because both of these can balance each other out, leading to the same mouse sensitivity.
But one is better than the other. But… WHICH ONE?
HMMM. Okay, high DPI with low in-game amplification
is better. BUT WHY? And by how much does it matter?
To demonstrate, I loaded up Unreal Tournament with low DPI and high in-game amplification.
That’s the bad combination. You can see how much it skips between movements, meaning
that if there was somebody between these two spots, I’m unable to aim at them. You don’t
want this. You want to be able to aim at each and every pixel in-game so that this sort
of thing never happens! On the other hand, using a higher mouse DPI
and lower in-game amplification, it will feel exactly the same sensitivity to play with,
but won’t skip pixels because the in-game amplification is low.
Therefore, it makes more sense to use a high DPI setting with your mouse, and to lower
the in-game mouse sensitivity until you reach what feels good to play with.
But how much does this matter? The reality is, the reason I used Unreal Tournament
to demonstrate pixel skipping was because in Counter Strike, the problem was far less
noticeable. Even with the maximum mouse amplification setting in-game, it would only jump at most,
2 pixels? The only way it could make a noticeable difference was to set field of view to 170
and to look at the very corners of the image. Here, it would skip dozens of pixels in one
go! But in the middle of the screen, it wasn’t noticeable, which is kind of where it’s
important. You may encounter it in the menus, depending
on how sensitive you’ve got your mouse set in Windows. At maximum, I found my mouse skipped
2-3 pixels at a time on my desktop and was really annoying. This carried on over to Counter-Strike’s
menus, fullscreen or not. As you might have figured by now, pixel-skipping
isn’t determined by the DPI at all, only by mouse amplification setting in-game or,
if you’re in Counter-Strike’s game menus, the Windows mouse setting.
So, we can see that pixel-skipping is a thing, now to go the other extreme: what’s the
smallest amount you can move your aim in-game? Counter-Strike lets you see exactly where
you’re stood and the direction you’re looking with the console command ‘getpos’.
Using this, I moved it the tiniest amount that I could at different in-game amplifications,
and got these results. Before I start, we’re not talking ‘pixel
jumps’ here. Most of the time, the jump is by less than a pixel- far less- so I’ll
measure the angle change instead. At the maximum sensitivity of 8, your view
changes by .176 of a degree every time, meaning that it would take 2046 of these to turn full
360 degrees around. As your sensitivity goes down, the number of jumps required to turn
full 360 goes up. At 1 sensitivity in-game it requires over 16,000 ‘jumps’ to turn
all the way around. If you don’t know how exactly this translates into actual performance
in-game, don’t worry- neither do I. It’s just good to know that sensitivity changes
the amount by which your view ‘jumps’. I also tested whether resolution or aspect
ratio changes anything. For this I devised a state-of-the-art test. I tried 640x480.
I tried 720p. And I tried 4K. All required the same mouse distance to be travelled to
achieve a full 360, and each of them jumped the same number of pixels per movement. What
does this mean?! It means aspect ratio and resolution will NOT change how the mouse moves
in-game. BUT, because of that, it does mean that the
higher your resolution, the more pixels your view will ‘jump’ by with each mouse movement-
because obviously there are more pixels you have to cross to reach where you want to be
aiming. So with your DPI and mouse sensitivity, at 640x480, it might not skip pixels. But
move to a 4K monitor, but keeping everything else the same, and it might jump 3 or 4 at
a time! Gameplay-wise, nothing will have changed- but visually, you’ll be skipping more pixels.
It’s just that they’re smaller and less important pixels.
In other words, higher DPI has helped prepare us for high resolution monitors and the extra
precision that they can show! So in conclusion, I don’t think that pixel-skipping
is an issue in Counter-Strike. Yes, you can get better sub-pixel accuracy by lowering
your mouse amplification in-game, ramping up your mouse’s DPI to compensate. But even
at 8, unless you’re REALLY LOOKING FOR IT, you’d be hard-pressed to find a situation
where a pixel jump makes a difference. Your own individual skill and weapon’s inaccuracy
will determine your fate long before a missed pixel does. And who plays the game at 8 any
way? Most people will have the in-game setting far lower, and 3, 2 or even below, meaning
that they couldn’t skip a pixel even if they tried.
Making this video useless. If you like useless then check out 2kliksphilip’s
channel. He has a tutorial here on how to make targets easier to hit. And here’s one
where he uses his bum to wank.