What is the polling rate in a gaming mouse?
In the use of office automation or similar, we care little about the DPI or the Polling Rate of a mouse. However, when we are going to make a more advanced use – design, edition, gaming-, the technical aspects of this peripheral completely change the experience of use, and probably the results derived from it. The Polling Rate, the ‘polling rate’, allows us to move the mouse appear faster on the computer monitor, hence it is essential for certain uses of the mouse.
Although it seems like a simple peripheral, in reality, a mouse is a crucial element of the computer, depending on its uses of it. It depends on its technical characteristics that the movement of our hand translates into one or another position on the screen, and that this happens in one way or another. Leaving aside the DPI, which is better known to all users, the polling rate is the frequency with which the mouse position is reported to the computer. This frequency is measured in hertz; for example, 125 Hz would be 125 times per second that the mouse reports its position to the computer.
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What is the mouse polling rate, and what is the use of modifying the polling rate in a mouse
In some gaming mice, proprietary software allows us to change the settings on it. And in addition to modifying the button configuration, or adjusting the DPI of the mouse, we can also select the polling rate of the peripheral. As we mentioned, a higher polling rate implies informing the computer more regularly of the exact position of the mouse. In this way, we will have a more precise movement, which in some video games is critical. Or simply, the exact position of the mouse will be displayed more precisely over time, to work more fluidly, for example, in editing and design.
In the settings we will see 125 Hz as a minimum, as usual, this being 8 ms as the frequency of the report; 250Hz, 4ms; 500 Hz for 2 ms, and 1000 Hz for 1 ms. The ideal would be to configure the maximum sampling rate in all cases, however, this will affect the CPU, which will receive and have to process more information for the same period. We must also be careful with the extensions to change the cursor in Chrome, which can affect.
