What DPI Is Needed to Saturate 4000 Hz
4000 Hz mice are the new top dogs in terms of specs but things are not as simple as just plugging in the mouse and playing. This is simply because 4000 Hz has certain requirements and to achieve a stable 4000 Hz polling rate you need to do some PC tuning.
Beyond the tuning though there is one aspect that is often ignored when it comes to achieving a stable 4K Hz polling rate and that is your DPI.
DPI and Hz
In most cases you would think of DPI and Hz as separate factors for your aim, but if you want to maintain a stable 4000 Hz polling rate you need to correlate the two variables. This is because to get close to 4000 Hz you need to move your mouse pretty fast across your mousepad.
You can achieve 1000 Hz pretty easily even on 400 DPI by swinging your mouse around a bit, but anything below 1600 DPI on 4000 Hz means you will most likely hover at around 2000-3000 Hz max polling rate since there is not enough movement for the sensor to boost up to 4K.
Testing
To prove my point I did some testing using the official Razer tool that was provided for the Razer Viper 8K to monitor my Hz live while imitating smooth tracking scenarios (smooth circles with minimal acceleration/deceleration). This is technically a worst-case scenario since this type of aim requires controlled, smooth, and steady movements meaning that your DPI here will have a big impact on how high your Hz will go.
While the test is pretty simple you can see that the higher you climb on the DPI scale the higher your Hz climbs even with very small and smooth movements. This means that if you want to play at 4000 Hz at all times (even during aim scenarios where you do not move your hand a lot) you should look into swapping to 1600-3200-6400 DPI.
To be super safe you can play on 6400 DPI and just set your Windows cursor speed to 3 to imitate 1600 DPI or use anything you find comfortable between the 3 DPI stages mentioned above. The only real downside of using something like 3200-6400 DPI is that in certain games you do not have enough decimals to set your game sens the way you want so you should be aware of that (ex: in Apex Legends if you use 6400 DPI the lowest sensitivity you can use is 32 cm because 0.2 is the lowest value).
