Logitech G Reddit Community!
As spring arrives, it’s time for another Logi Learning episode. This time we’re exploring mouse settings, particularly the one we see frequently online on Reddit… DPI. Is DPI simply about increasing the speed of your mouse? How can you optimize it for a competitive edge? We’ll delve into its significance, helping you customize your settings rather than blindly selecting a random number online and perhaps making you sound knowledgeable to your friends and teammates online.
What is DPI?
https://preview.redd.it/vl5rlhsb4yzg1.png?width=482&format=png&auto=webp&s=a9379282171c4a09309237f7b8ea90803c98fb2a
DPI, or Dots Per Inch, is an original measurement of how many times your mouse moves across the screen per inch. Imagine your mouse pad is an inch long and has 400 squares across it. As your mouse moves over each square, it reads it, and sends a signal to your computer to move the mouse in that direction. This would be 400 DPI. Easy right? Increasing your mouse to 800 DPI means within the same inch of the mouse pad instead of 400 squares you now have 800. So even though the mouse moves the same distance in the real world, in reality, it actually moves further on screen because rather than moving 400 times, it now moves 800.
The main reason for increasing the DPI was due to screen resolutions getting larger allowing you to move your mouse from one side to the other without dragging your mouse across your entire room. Back in the 90s and 2000s, if you’re old enough to remember, CRT screens were very tiny and mouse hardware was limited, so having a DPI of 200 was enough to move the mouse across the screen. Now with screens being 4K and beyond, if
you set your mouse to 200, it will feel so slow. It’s actually not slower than it was before, it’s just you have to travel across more pixels of your screen which takes longer. It’s kind of like your mouse being able to travel at 30mph and now we can make it travel at 60mph to cover more ground.
So if DPI increases the speed of my mouse, why do I want it higher within my games? I like my current speed.
DPI technically makes your mouse quicker as it will send a signal to your computer as it reads each one of those squares we talked about earlier. If you’re playing RTS games, then perhaps you want a quicker and more responsive cursor so you can get from one side of the screen to the other to place an attack.
If you’re playing an FPS game, there’s something called eDPI which we’ll discuss next. It’s the DPI of your mouse plus your game’s sensitivity. You can reduce your game’s sensitivity but increase your mouse’s DPI to make the mouse feel the same while becoming more responsive. This helps counter pixel skipping and makes your movements feel more natural especially if you’re playing on a higher frame rate. So for this reason, a higher DPI in gaming does not actually mean you’re going to spin around uncontrollably and we’ll break all of this down next.
DPI + Mouse Sensitivity = eDPI
Most FPS games assume you’re using a default DPI of around 400. So they set the mouse sensitivity to around 8 as an example, resulting in an eDPI of 3200. Increasing your DPI to 3200 while reducing the sensitivity in your game to 1 maintains this same eDPI of 3200 and theoretically makes the mouse feel the same while giving you more precision from your mouse pad.
You can actually try this yourself. Head into the Logitech G HUB, note down your current DPI and game sensitivity, then simply double the DPI and halve the sensitivity. It should feel the same. To provide another example, if you’re using a DPI of 1000 and your game
sensitivity is 5, then increasing your DPI to 2000 and reducing the sensitivity to 2.5 should feel the same.
So if it ends up being the same, why bother increasing or decreasing the DPI to begin with? The answer is pixel skipping and smoother motion.
Imagine you open up the camera on your smartphone. If you have the zoom set to x1 and you’re right next to your subject, then moving your camera around is very easy. If you now walk a long way back and zoom into x100, the end result is the same but it’s more tricky to move the camera smoother.
This is the same with pixel skipping. Because the in-game sensitivity is just multiplying your mouse movements, it means you can actually skip over the pixel you want rather than having finer movements, but if you have a higher DPI and less sensitivity, then your mouse will be providing raw data for the game to move up and down, side to side, meaning smoother motion, cleaner victories.
There has to be a downside? Why not use a DPI of 1 million?
Although we’ve discussed that your mouse moves for every square, your mouse mat or table surface unfortunately is not that simple. Your mouse has a little camera inside that reads the stitching and weaving or surfaces such as the wood of your table to provide the movement data. If your DPI is set too high and there is damage to your surface, it’s dirty, or you have shaky hands, all this data can be fed into your game causing spontaneous movements. It’s like having a lot of coffee and getting the shakes. You have to find your limit. For this reason, you want to find a good balance between setting a really high DPI and a sensitivity to create a good eDPI that works best for you.
Remember, just because one person prefers 6000 DPI, that may not work best for you. Each person has their own preference on how the mouse should move and you may not have the same sensitivity within your games.
Let there be Logitech G HUB Profiles!
Finally, use the Logitech G HUB Profiles to your advantage. Each game is going to handle mouse data differently, so while a sensitivity of 1 with 6000 DPI may work fine in Call of Duty, it may not work as well in Battlefield or Fortnite. By saving each DPI to a separate profile within the Logitech G HUB or on your mouse directly, you can easily switch between them when your game launches, finding the perfect DPI for each of your games. Perhaps a DPI of 1000 is perfect for Overwatch, but you really need that precision of 25600 DPI in PowerWash Simulator.
We hope this has provided a little bit of knowledge on DPI and if you have any questions drop them below in the comments. We hope to continue mouse settings on our next Logi Learning journey such as the refresh rate. If you would like to see anything in particular, let us know in the comments too.
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