Mouse Settings & Sensitivity Glossary

A firmware prediction algorithm that automatically flattens slight hand deviations to draw perfectly straight horizontal or vertical lines. Avoided in competitive gaming.

The exact physical distance in centimeters your mouse must travel horizontally across your desk to rotate your in-game 3D camera 360 degrees.

The technically accurate term for mouse DPI. The number of coordinate pulses the optical sensor registers per inch of physical travel.

The process where Windows drops incoming coordinate counts when pointer speed is set below 6/11 (e.g. 4/11 drops 50% of counts).

A low-level Windows API that allows game engines to read coordinate data directly from the USB driver, bypassing OS pointer speed and acceleration.

The standard commercial term describing the spatial sampling density of an optical mouse sensor.

A normalized sensitivity metric calculated by multiplying hardware DPI by in-game sensitivity (DPI × Sens).

Microsoft’s built-in Windows mouse acceleration curve that non-linearly multiplies cursor travel based on hand swipe velocity.

The physical distance in inches required to rotate your in-game camera a full 360 degrees.

The artificial multiplication of coordinate pulses when Windows pointer speed is set above 6/11, causing the cursor to jump across multiple pixels at once.

The physical height in millimeters at which an optical sensor ceases tracking when the mouse is lifted off the mousepad.

A sensor firmware feature that synchronizes optical sampling events with USB polling intervals, reducing report timing jitter at the cost of ~0.5 ms latency.

Internal EEPROM flash memory inside the mouse that saves DPI stages, polling rates, and keybinds directly on the device.

The frequency in Hertz (Hz) at which the computer queries the mouse for state updates (e.g. 1000 Hz = 1 update per millisecond).

The nominal elapsed time in milliseconds between successive USB state packets (125 Hz = 8 ms, 1000 Hz = 1 ms, 8000 Hz = 0.125 ms).

Mathematical averaging frames applied by sensor microcontrollers at ultra-high DPI steps (typically >3200 DPI) to filter out jitter.

The neutral, lossless 6th notch of the classic Windows pointer speed slider that guarantees 1:1 hardware coordinate pass-through.

The hardcoded angle in degrees that an in-game 3D camera turns for each single coordinate count received (e.g. 0.022 in Source Engine).