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).
Might not be wholly true, some games allow for even further settings if you access their config file. Like bf2042 allows negative values. But I have a better solution. My best solution though to keep saturation of 4khz is to use rawacell with raw accel CL profile switcher. That way you can bind 800, 1600, and native sensitivities that take place system wide and are not ignored by raw input modes. Find it a better solution than windows sens because you can artificially lower your dpi to say 1600 without hurting latency and polling saturation. Mix with auto hotkey and… Read more »
True, in most games you can just edit the sensitivity value from the config but there are games where you can’t go lower than a certain threshold because of engine limitations (Apex). I did use Rawaccel to test setting a higher dpi value and making it feel like a lower value that is usable for desktop. This might have been only in my case but with a super high DPI (10k+) I would get weird motion delay on micro adjustments with my HSK Pro 4K, so I just turned it off. I can control my mouse easily at 3200 DPI… Read more »
So i been looking at this and i swapped over to 4k mouse, i run 1600DPI. my sensitivity in games feels so much more loose so i even had to lower the sense even more and it just messed it all up and i ended up going back to 1k, any help regarding this ?
What you are feeling is the extra information from the mouse that now polls 4x info (or at least I assume so). It basically reflects your errors in aim more accurately because now it picks up all of the small corrections you make. In short 4000 Hz has a higher skill ceiling so you need to get used to it by playing more or aim training a bit.
ahh thanks for that, i think what my main problem was the driver for the mouse mightve gotten some interfearance from one of my older mice drivers, i uninstalled all drivers and reinstalled and that smoothened up everything so i think thats also a thing people need to remember to do.
So, if I stick with 800dpi then there is no real benefit? I play Fortnite and most play between 400-800dpi. Is it worth raising my dpi to 1600 and halfing my in-game sensitivity? I got the Deathadder v3 and considering the Razer 4k wireless dongle, but, it’s like 50 more bucks.
If you want to really benefit from 4000 Hz (or at least close to it during slow movements) you should start with 1600 DPI. 1600 DPI is also better in terms of response times for your sensor so there are no downsides to going higher DPI. You can still use 800 DPI for 4000 Hz but I do not think thats optimal.
Hey. I think 400/800 dpi works better in CS because of smaller margin of error. So is it worth it to go like 800 dpi and 2000 hz?
What do you mean by margin of error? The only difference between 400-800 DPI and 1600-3200 DPI would be that the higher DPI has less latency and lower chances of pixel skipping since you need to use lower in-game sens values. You can technically use any DPI with any HZ since most people have certain preferences. I’m depicting an ideal situation where you minimize the drops in your HZ, but you can use whatever you want in the games you play.
You can lower the sensitivity in Apex Legends < 0.2 using a .cfg file
I tried it, but when I tested the sens it actually was still at 0.2 even though the cfg had a lower value in it. I might try again at some point, maybe Respawn fixed it or something.
For 1600 and 800, 1600 is better, but in fact you will not use 1600*1. For 1600*0.5 and 800*1, does the advantage of 1600 still exist?