What Is Mouse Lod? Should You Care About It and How to Change It?

When looking for a good gaming mouse you will be faced with a couple of very important metrics that will heavily influence the user experience with the product.

These metrics are DPI, polling rate, and LOD. Since we have already talked about DPI and polling rate, it only makes sense we also discuss what LOD is, why it is important, and how to change your LOD value.

What Is Mouse LOD?

Simply put mouse LOD is the lift-off distance at which the sensor stops tracking the movement of your mouse. This is important because during gameplay you will often have to pick up your mouse and reposition it on the mousepad.

With a high mouse LOD, the sensor will keep tracking while you already lifted the mouse resulting in inaccuracies during gameplay.

Should You Care About Mouse LOD?

Since we are talking about important metrics related to mice and their sensors it is obvious you should care about LOD when purchasing new products.

LOD greatly influences the tracking capability of your mouse since if the LOD is too high you will experience a lot of issues during the process of lifting your mouse. You can also experience spin-outs or shaky cursor movements and a slew of other sensor-related issues.

Making sure to purchase a mouse with low native LOD and with the capability to also adjust LOD if need be is quite important.

Most gaming mice have a LOD of around 3 mm which is a good balance between too high and too low.

The main influencing factor in LOD is the mouse sensor. Unfortunately, even great mice like the Razer Viper Mini are known to have high LOD because of the budget sensor inside of the mouse.

Another important factor for LOD is the mouse feet you are using. The mouse feet naturally create distance between the mousepad and the sensor therefore can influence LOD leading to shaky tracking or complete spinouts.

This usually happens when your mouse feet are too thick or were placed incorrectly leading to sensor tracking issues because of LOD. In these cases, you should try buying a different pair of mouse feet.

This specific issue is quite common with ceramic mouse feet since they are thicker than normal PTFE mouse feet.

The last influencing factor when it comes to LOD is your mousepad. Different textured surfaces also sometimes cause issues with LOD making the mouse shaky and unusable. Most often these are Cordura pads like the MPC450 or the MP510 that have clear bumps and rough textures.

Even though these issues exist, with most mice you can resolve the shaky cursor issue by simply increasing the LOD for the sensor or your mouse.

How to Change Your Mouse LOD

To get to fixing your mouse LOD issues you need to figure out if your mouse uses software or it has a dedicated hardware button.

In the case of the MZ1 to change the lift-off distance of the mouse you can simply use the hardware buttons on the bottom of the mouse.

mz1 polling rate button

Most other mice have a software where you can simply increase the LOD slider from 2mm to 3mm. This should help with the ceramic feet, or thicker PTFE feet and also help with the rough surfaces of your mousepad.

gloriuos mouse parameters

The Logitech G Pro Superlight, on the other hand, has no such slider and apparently, the sensor adjusts the LOD automatically for the surface it uses, calibrating according to necessity. This is somewhat neat, but in case the sensor is miscalibrated you are stuck with an unusable mouse that spins out.

logitech g pro x mouse settings manager

Luckily there have been no issues with the GPX on any pads (Cordura, hybrid, or cloth pads) therefore for now we can assume the self-calibrating sensor is doing a good job.

About The Author

Chris (vile_is_dead)

Custom Windows ISO enjoyer, FPS optimizer, and aim improvement enthusiast. Will disassemble all of his peripherals (and sometimes PC parts) to mod them even if all of them work perfectly fine. Discord/Twitter: vile_is_dead

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