In the area of gaming mice, DPI isn’t everything. A more important figure is its polling rate. This is number of times that Windows checks the USB port for changes. A lower polling rate will give you jerky mouse movements as Windows only detects movement when it polls the port.

The above diagram illustrates this. When you have a high DPI mouse, but low polling rate, the smooth curve that your hand draws will have sharp edges as Windows only checks for movement every so often.

The thick black line of the larger curve is your hand movement moving the mouse through a semi circle. The red dots are when Windows polls the USB port. The thin blue line shows the actual on screen movement of the cursor. As you can see, the curve isn’t that great as Windows isn’t polling the port often enough. The smaller black curve is the same hand movement, but at a lower DPI. In this case, the curve is smoother as there is less on screen movement, but still shows the sharp edges. Both black lines represent the same mouse movement in the same amount of time.

Below these are the lines that the curve drew on screen. The purple line shows a higher polling rate. As you can see, it’s smoother as there are more points recorded by Windows. If you have a high DPI mouse, but a low polling rate, then the speed of high DPI will not be matched by accuracy as Windows will struggle to record the movement. The higher the polling rate, the better the accuracy. The higher the DPI, the more speed you get.

You may think that setting your polling rate to 6 million will give you the best accuracy known to man, but unfortunately, increased polling results in increased CPU usage. Also, mice are limited by certain key components to their maximum polling rate.

The polling effect can mean the different between handing ass and waiting to respawn.

Download the polling rate checker from here (external link)