50% Less Input Lag! Low DPI vs. High DPI Analysis 

@@kmndra5831 even worse is some games in full screen borderless modes, high DPI can make the invisible cursor go outside the border and then when you click you click out of the game

I just experience this in New World

With raw accel you can use high dpi with a lower sens multiplier

@@a1e738 I know, that's what I do, but not every game allows you to go low enough in sensitivity if you use 12k DPI and above

@@wile123456 He's probably talking about the program "raw accel" iirc there used to be a raw accel dll injection so it's compatible with virtually everything.

It's kind of sad that he is just testing one mouse. Would be great to see input lag results for the XM1 too.

are all sensors the same?

@@TheKillerZmile no

its the death adder. Theres other testing by other people with many more test subjects that show this. The G Pro X superlight was tested alongside the 10khz models that just came out, there was no latency difference between them. The death adder is unique in this oddity.

@@TheKillerZmile no

Yo exactly I was ganna go to 1600 but most games ingame sensitivity doesn't go fucking down enough doing fucking 3 360s in one mouse swipe

@@moretoastedthanatoasterstr9773 i play on 12000 DPI and its just amazing for me with high fps to match. To each his own i suggest everyone try high dpi low sens to at least see how they like it.

@@UltraMegaFail ya no I I complete agree was playing on 400 dpi like 2 months after I got a computer and iv had it since 2014 and fuck me wish I bump the dpi a long time ago

wrong but semi right. as an FPS player who is high rank in all FPS games (radiant valorant, global csgo, FPL). we use 400 DPI and 800 DPI because it's more consistent when it comes to pixel tracking. if there is less variable for mistake on lower DPI but if you go too low it will become skippy and unplayable so people assumed 800 DPI was the best but 400DPI has been proven to be just as good.

@@Soleft i can only speak on behalf of everyone i know and everyone in the pro scene of FPS games. it's not like there is a data sheet, we just can feel the difference

i use 9000

Yeah this one took a while. :)

Me too, amazing content.

@@BattleNonSense I can imagine, thanks for the hard work. Ever since you announced it I was very curious about the results. Maybe you'd be able to make the movement slower by using gears? Or will that be too complicated or maybe cause too much inaccuracy?

@@BattleNonSense Thanks for the results. I would be very very very interested in the same test just with different brands. Take 2 common logitech mice, a razer, a Corsair and compare them please. And if possible with an even lower initial speed, because when tracking a target while full auto I am sure I dont move my mouse as fast as seen in your first test... Thanks! :)

@@BattleNonSense quake champions at next patch get nvidia reflex ,plz test input lag 🙂

This

so, keep using 400 dpi ?

@@kontrasergeant yes only noobs watch these videos and think they are real

I want to use 6400dpi, but the problem I encounter in game is that the mouse will be too fast, even in lowest game sensivity. My question is, will a low windows mouse sensitivity solve the problem with high DPI I described above?

Yeah so basically just go for highest DPI and lower in-game sens accordingly, and you get both more accuracy and less lag.

with 900 dpi you basically make your mouse in need to add an interpolation process while registering your mouse mouvement wich can create jitter and inaccuracy. Most mouse has a native dpi of 800 so you need to make a dpi number that is a multiple of 800 since 900 its not a multiple of 800 I suggest you first to check the native dpi of your mouse and use a multiple of it for native 800 dpi use 800 - 1600 - 2400 - 3200 - 4000 etc (tbh more than 2400 is useless in my opinion) Also you need to take in count your monitor this is due to the fact that DPI does not adjust with resolution, meaning lower DPI settings on higher resolution monitors can cause slight stuttering and imprecise aiming in games. Just realise its a 2 years old comment lol. You probably doesnt care anymore at all aha

same. but i do use 800 for games

USB 1.1 and 2.0 are 1kHz max, 1ms repear rate. And it's the device that decides this, not the PC.

​@@CanwegetSubscriberswithn-cu2it All his graphs are showing is a delta normalized DPI, DPI / (hand distance / cursor distance moved) * delta. This is simply how mouse sensors work, the lower your DPI the longer between your mouse jumping pixels, this should be obvious and common sense considering you know that DPI means "Dots Per Inch." Waffle never claimed it's determined by the PC so we already know you're intellectually disingenuous lol

@@SoftBreadSoftware I have actually read tge USB protocol specifications and have programmed USB devises. The 1kHz polling rate was the max available in hatdware for USB 1.1 and 2.0. Only USB 3.0 added the ability to clock the interrupt transfers ss multiples of 125us instead of 1ms.

The polling is done by the USB controller, not the "PC". While there are devices which alow changing the polling rate, these are pre-defined by the device. The PC may choose which one, but they are pre-determined by the device, not the PC. I'm familiar with the actual USB specification, I've done ISB development. I know how this shit operates.

@@CanwegetSubscriberswithn-cu2it Was he using USB 1 or 2? That would be another flaw in the video.

500hz will be much more delayed than 1000

@@ULouOW that is actually not true

@Alex.UA6 Yea, not necessarily more delayed, but just generally bad. nobody would ever deliberately decide to use 500HZ over 1000HZ. I can see people deciding to use 1000HZ over 2K of 4K because they got used to 1K, but generally most inputs from a 500HZ mouse will be more delayed than a 1000HZ one

it depend on the game tbh for example r6 is coded for 128hz mouse polling rate so if you use 1000hz there you nerf yourself. apex legends for example support max 500hz (mby that changed i talk about like a year ago i didnt play r6 and apex since) so better use 500 on apex and most game tbh counter strike does support very well high mouse polling rate so its fine to use 1000hz + there same for valorant and im not sure but i think call of duty also support it very well.

Agreed. in some games though you can do it even if the ingame settings won’t allow it. You just have to tinker with game files. In r6s, you have to open some ini file. It’s not as intuitive but that’s just how it is. It differs for every game.

Just run something that feels comfortable, you don't need every game to be exactly the same

Why not

@@firellio070 download MarkC windows10 fixer and use the movement recorder. See for yourself. I'm no claiming to know why, but it is like that.

I know this is older but I would like to see where you got this info.

@@DoubsGaming I'd never be able to track it down, I actually looked for it a couple days ago. Their is/was a reputable source for that though.

​@@DoubsGamingIt's been a month, bit might still be useful. Techpowerup reviews include in-depth testing of sensors, with one part being smoothing.

What does smoothing means and why is it bad?

@@rubenbaczo8497 will be less raw, will have like a "filter" between your hardware(mouse) and the cursor in the monitor, will not be 1:1 (mouse movement and cursor in monitor), and this usually add latency (less real time between the response with the mouse/system)

you have to spam 1 3 1 3 1 3 to get out the lan jitters in freeze time

yes

= same eDPI

Yeah the test methology is inaccurate and inconclusive without accounting for eDPI. He should retest with the proper ingame sensitivity adjusted.

@@TheVoitokas this

I think he's not using a game with a concept of 'sensitivity' or 'eDPI', it's using software which flashes the screen black -> white on an input (i.e. one mouse packet with count values)

@@tomhepz we still need ingame tests with same eDPI lol. Nobody plays testing software😂

omg where did you read that?

Has he quit?

what happened?

@@riba2233 yeah he had to leave RU-vid for family reasons. He made a community post on this channel explaining this.

@@Superdazzu2 he had to leave RU-vid for family reasons

Should have used eDPI to maintain the same overall "sensitivity" and relationship between DPI and in game sensitivity values. If he doubled the DPI, halving the in game value would maintain the same relationship. Otherwise all we're seeing is the time relation between sensor signals as the sensor tracks it's position

@@geologik7500 exactly

I said the same in my comment, he replied as well, I don't think he agrees.

@@Anderson_Roger I think you didn't formulate the question very well, the simplest way to put is as Dane did

@@geologik7500 time relation between sensor signals is delay though. It's not like he measures smoothness, he measures first detectable change.

600 DPI Immortal Race

400 DPI god race

200 dpi devil race

1100 dpi gang.

The same thing applies. All ingame sensitivity setting affects is how much your camera rotates per pixel traveled. Meaning it depends on your DPI. If your DPI is 1000, your camera will make 1000 movements per inch the mouse travels. If your DPI is 10000, your camera will make 10000 movements per inch the mouse travels. Lower the sensitivity accordingly to make up for this

You must be not that good at fps games then💀

@@bigbob5103 Pretty old comment but the only FPS games I remember playing the most was the Halo series and that was on console. I dont have much interest in FPS most games in general, not the multiplayer ones anyway.

@@Vaxtin oh okay that makes sense then😭😭😭 I would get so triggered if there was a slight difference between my sens in each competitive shooter I play

Long-story short, use higher DPI and lower the in-game sensitivity to make up for it, then after that get a smooth mousepad, trust me it makes all the difference, maybe the mousepad even more.

no just go higher, the problem is that your aiming where your supposed to but the input lag causes like an ice skates effect caused by the delay to stop, i can feel it at 1600, it goes away at 3200

At the slow speed (10mm, 100ms) it should only take 2.5ms to move between DPI points at 100dpi. Maybe the acceleration delay, from stationary to full speed, is affecting it. It could be mouse smoothing built into the firmware.

I put in the same question (he replied to my comment). It wasn't apparently.

Calling it input lag is a rather poor choice of words, it's not like a signal takes more time to reach its destination but rather there are fewer updates in a given time. He should have made it more clear that it's behaving closer to how polling rate affects input lag which is in the end the amount of information in a given time period.

This is a very insightful comment. Maybe using the data for when the mouse stops (instead of the start) can minimize this effect...

Does that matter? are you going to game the system by introducing a quick flick before every tracking attempt?

I would wager that this is almost entirely a sensitivity effect, not a latency effect. Controlling for the difference in sensitivity by testing e.g. 1600dpi 4sens against 800dpi 8sens should nullify the overwhelming majority of the difference. Chris is using the data measured with different sensitivites to say that a higher DPI which is scaled down to have equal sensitivity would have an improved latency. The data does not support this at all - it's a mistake in interpretation.

That's the thing. Lower DPI requires more movement to be registered, and is thus slower. The higher DPI for a given movement, the more often updates get registered, hence lower input lag. It's similar to how higher FPS provides lower input lag due to more updates, except that in the case of mouse, the frequency scales with movement speed, hence lower delay at higher speeds. At very high speeds, the input lag due to DPI updates approaches zero, leaving the rest of the system lag that in this case seems to be 20ms.

@@AnimeReference yes, it does matter for specific games, bunnyhop to be specific

he always measure the same distance and the same speed, its like setting low dpi and high in game sens vs high dpi low and low in game sens, it looks correct to me

@@dubby_ow He doesn't do that in this video. See my comment, he even replied confirming that. (he should have done that)

@@Anderson_Roger I feel like static in game sens is a right choice here, so only the dpi of a mouse can have an impact on the result, he couldnt done both, to keep eDPI the same and compare, but I feel that in game sens being just a multiplier of the mouse dpi, wouldnt change anything

I had a similar thought. For these tests, if you scaled in-game sensitivity with DPI, then I think the results would be more comparable. Meaning, 100 DPI with 5 sens would become 200 DPI with 2.5 sens, and so on. Therefore, the amount of 'turning' that occurs is the same since the ratio of DPI to sensitivity is the same.

Also big note: in games with high zoom levels(i.e. battlefield 4's 40x scope) low dpi will fuck up your aim as it'll become jittery, at that point if you're gonna snipe from long range you might as well use a controller instead with how jittery the aiming becomes at sub800 dpi

I set mine to 20k DPI and turned the windows mouse settings cursor speed to 1. Feels the same as 1600 at default windows setting.

@@CABALlc1 you don’t want to fuck with windows settings. Leave it at 6

I believe you can use RawAccel to solve that. Sens multiplier. You also don't have to use the accel feature.

@@CABALlc1 windows mouse settings dont affect any game still played today

on 1080p 800 dpi should be subpixel precise to about 9.4''/360° and slower. on 1440p to about 12.8''/360° and slower, bot assuming 90° fov

Yes

Obviously it reacts slower. The video is about finding out just how much more input lag it adds, not if.

@@rdmz135 Huh?!! Do you even know how the LDAT works?!

This also means that discarding 50% of the mouse counts (or making them move a camera 50% as much) via using a lower sensitivity multiplier would nullify any latency improvement from doubling DPI.

@@AerynGaming Exactly. As soon as every DPI adjustment meets the distance necessary to report 1 count, ALL of then would have the SAME exact input lag at that moment. This video has the most stupid conclusion ever about how mice resolution works. It's like saying that 4k gaming has 50% less input lag at horizontal and vertical movements because you're moving "double the pixels". You can arguee that higher DPI resolution at the same speed will trigger higher polling rate frequency report, but AGAIN, this would be nulified as soon as the lower DPI settings moves the same distance needed for a single count. The only effect that would had at going at higher DPI values is a smoother "granularity effect", that people misinterpret as "pixel skipping". Assuming that the eDPI would be the same.

you HAVE to set your windows mouse sens to 6/11 or it will have smoothing/acceleration. and uncheck the box that says "enhance pointer precision". if you dont do this you will never develop proper muscle memory

@@mtbSTL why does it have to be 6/11? Might sound dumb but if the game you're playing has raw input on, why does the windows pointer speed matter?

@@mewmore6147it doesnt

Most games nowadays use raw input from the mouse though, so that _shouldn't_ be a factor. Unless you're playing an older game of course. Completely agree that it could be a nice video to see though, just get a definitive answer once and for all.

@jparkerwillis I’d also like to know if the settings are different if you’re using the new Windows 10 sensitivity slider or the classic method inside the Control Panel.

Generally speaking the windows mouse settings do not affect games as these use raw input.

@@Plazmunky It's the new one that matters in Windows 10, not sure why everyone always talks about it like there's just 11 steps. The "classic" steps just correlate to _1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20_ on the new slider - yet all of those on the new one do affect cursor movement. If you set it to 19 for example, instead of 20 there is a difference 5% in speed.

@@BattleNonSense hi there, I'm curious about using macro software like X-Mouse button control will add some input lag, can you test it? for some reason many gamers use that software to change or create macro on their mouse like burst click or like auto reload when clicking button

Yup that was the main reason I stuck to 400 dpi for so long, but recently after battlenonsense made this discovery I switched to 800 dpi anything higher is too fast for me, and so far I havent ran into too many problems with sensitivity scaling in modern games, but a few years ago it was really common.

esports title have raw input

@@TheKillerZmile raw input doesnt invalidate the use of a higher DPI. Raw input means mouse input goes directly to game, meaning the input doesnt get rendered by your windows sensitivity settings or mouse acceleration by windows, anything like that. It's useful for sure, but the whole DPI thing still applies. 400 DPI is pretty suboptimal but unless you NEED every competitive edge you can get, you should probably go up to 800 or 1600. Just because my mouse can I use 12000 DPI with sensitivity on everything including windows scaled all the way down. Unless a game doesn't support extremely low sensitivities I have the DPI scaled up in Logitech G HUB. If your mouse can increase DPI super high I recommend you try it out, it's super cool to see how responsive your camera is to tiny mouse adjustments. And when you take a second to look close you can see how unresponsive your mouse was compared to with a higher DPI. This is unnoticeable with normal use unless you're making microadjustments in an FPS game

rawaccel homie!

yeah this affects games that dont have "raw input" in the settings. Generally its fine to make it go below 6 but if you go above, you start skipping pixels. Think about it like this; if you move two pixels by default and want to half that, you move one pixel every time the game wouldve gotten two pixels of movement. If you want to double the sensitivity, youd move 4 pixels for every 2 pixels of movement. This would mean that the smallest movement you can do is 2 pixels, hence the pixel skipping.

what accuracy, it is greater with higher dpi

@@riba2233 you introduce more "noise" into your movements with high dpi, which can negatively affect your accuracy, especially when tracking

@@Zalazaar yes and no but I see your point

i switched from 800 to 1600 and it feels way better in csgo, i cant go back to 800

@@bo0t3r29 i havent gone back to anyless than 1600 dpi since i made my switch. especially now that i been using the superlight. probably if i go lower than sens 1 now. lol.

when you are running a game your cpu is at max frequency so it doesn't matter at all.

@@eniff2925 this is not true at all, every CPU has multiple c/p-states (modern have 13), and every core on a cpu has different silicon quality, this is why single threaded boosting exists by default

@@XTripleJaxX c-states only activate at idle. When i play any game i can see my processor frequency run at maximum. So where is the problem?

@@XTripleJaxX Boosting is only cancelled if you don't have thermal headroom

@@eniff2925 your probably using the high performance plan which will only net you a small all-core boost if any because TDP will be maxed, use the balanced plan instead (if your on AMD you might need the chipset drivers depending on the CPU and will have to use the AMD plan), also you will only boost if you have significant thermal headroom (-20C to -30C) TJMAX on AMD and PROCHOT on intel, if your CPU still isint boosting make sure you actually have it enabled in BIOS although most motherboards support it, not all mobo VRMs will allow boosting

🙌🙌🙌

yeah but in the end its still 1000 dpi so its gonna be the same thing

Yea, I was wondering the same. Possibly the LDAT software is looking at some minimum delta of movement per frame, and at higher dpi you are more likely to trigger that

@@StardidiMarcelis yea, that's what I thought

I did the same test and compensated the sensitivity to match my old one went from 800 to 1600 but no way to actually measure it feels better tho I don't know maybe just placebo effect.

Good point. Most gamers probably have a pretty tight range of speed at which they're comfortable, so the whole "does more dpi reduce latency" thing only becomes interesting when you want to keep your comfortable, trained speed, but wonder if more or less dpi is better. If you do your 30cm/360°, you want to keep it.

He tested for intial movement, you're goofy