How to Check Keyboard Polling Rate
When talking about polling rates people most often think about their mice, since this is the most sensitive device in terms of inputs and is important for competitive gamers. By comparison, talking about keyboard polling rates is not as popular and is only really looked at in communities for games like osu! where your keystrokes matter a lot.
With the rising popularity of keyboards like the Wooting HE60, the main feature of which is blistering fast inputs, people have started paying more attention to how accurate and fast their keyboards are. Unlike the Wooting, most keyboards do not use analog signals that detect full switch motion with 0.1mm accuracy from start to end so the main measurement becomes Hz.
Keyboard Inspector
The issue with checking the keyboard polling rate is that there are few utilities compared to mouse polling rate checkers. Luckily I did find just what I needed by using Keyboard Inspector, a simple utility that can tell you whether your keyboard is running on 125, 500, or 1000 Hz. The way to use the utility is extremely simple:
- Press the Start Recording button
- Spam keys on your keyboard for a couple of seconds
- Stop recording
- Press on the Analyze tab and select Polling Rate Fitter
- Check out your result
Polling Rate Mod
For custom keyboards with specific PCBs that support QMK, you can force 1000Hz by flashing custom firmware onto your keyboard. The process is not complex but not simple either so it is better to follow something like this video.
This should technically work for any QMK-compatible board but you might encounter difficulties (like I have – got it to work in the end) which are heavily dependent on what PCB you are using. If you are new to software troubleshooting, I would suggest you ignore the mod, but if you are confident and want to force 1000 Hz, do so at your own risk.
Does the software not support keyboards with polling rates higher than 1000Hz?
I do not own a keyboard with a higher polling rate than 1000 therefore I cannot test whether it works or not. I looked at the github page but there was no mention of the max polling rate that the utility can do. Might need to do more digging on this topic.