Could anyone explain that in theory?
I like if I swith my sens from 1600x2.5 to 400x10, my screen rotation get less smooth.
Does low dpi cause the move line to be jaggies? Or high sens number in game setting cause your crosshair skip pixels?
I like the accuracy low dpi provides, but it makes my eye less comfortable.
lower dpi is more jittery ofc.
but i doubt its anything noticable and this pixel skip nonsense is really the last thing to worry about.
I only heard that maybe if the sensor is advertised as 5000dpi it works best up to 2000 only for example. but anything 400, 800, 1600 should be ok
Higher DPI is more accurate and smoother, assuming it is hardware DPI and not interpolated. Lower DPI is prone to pixel-skipping, and is less accurate.
Given an equivalent eDPI (dpi x sens), you move a bigger angle per âtickâ of the mouse. If that angle is big enough, it visibly skips pixels. If it skips pixels, that means the coarseness of your angle has a real, if small, effect on gameplay. This is also the source of the visible jitter.
1600x2.5 is what you probably should run, unless your mouse doesnât support a hardware resolution of 1600 (probably only true if youâre using a budget mouse, or a gaming mouse that is at least 5+ years old and was one of the older models available then; modern mice support very high resolution at the hardware level).
At 4k, youâll probably want 3200 x 1.25.
(There are calculators online, if it turns out that your mouseâs hardware supports a different set of fixed resolutions, that can tell you if you will pixel skip at a given screen resolution vs. mouse resolution/eDPI)
Dropping down to 800dpi is old news, and only applies to mice that actually only support 800dpi at the hardware level, meaning the smoothness at higher resolutions comes from interpolation (= mathematical guessing at where youâre going) and is not really accurate. If your higher resolution comes from real hardware⌠it really is accurate.
Dropping down to 400dpi is⌠I donât even know why you would?
If youâre running 800dpi at some reasonably low sensitivity @ 1080p screen resolution⌠youâre only skipping 1 pixel every once in awhile (the higher your edpi the more youâll skip; get it low enough and you could not skip at all).
OP is running at 400dpi though, and is probably at a higher resolution than 1080p, so they are probably skipping multiple pixels every mouse tick, at which point pixel skip is no longer a minor academic concern but a noticeable effect.
Thank you for the explain.
The reason I use 400 not 1600, is because 1600 has very slight input deday. I have the newest mouses, but my PC cpu was like made in 2012. When the dpi data stream convert into camera rotation, 1600 take 16times (800 is 4times) than 400 cpu resourse to do that. It may causes 0.002 second input delay which you can not feel, but 0.002 second can cause you miss head shots.
This doesnât make sense for several reasons. First of all, if you have a modern mouse, then itâs always polling at 16,000 or 32,000 or something like that. The drivers just divide the actually resolution down to the effective resolution you asked for. It doesnât take any more time to divide by 10 than it does to divide by 40.
Even if it did take 4 times as long to make that division, even a 2012 CPU is running at a gigahertz - it does hundreds of operations in a millionth of a second (most operations take more than 1 clock cycle, but most take times in the single-digits of clock cycles).
So thereâs no way that you are getting input delay for the reason you suggest.
Even if you do have an extra 2ms input delay from using a different resolution⌠at 240 Hz, youâre taking 41.67ms between frames. The time for motor impulses (not including any thought or decision making, just the time for signal to travel from brain to fingers) is measured in dozens of ms.
An extra 2ms is not going to cause a substantial difference in accuracy, certainly less difference in accuracy than pixel-skipping which many people already consider to be too small an effect to worry about.
Many games do not actually provide sensitivity sliders that can go low enough to play at high DPIs even if you wanted to. I play overwatch at 3.5@800 which is sufficient, but for many other games 800 dpi at the absolute lowest setting is still too fast. There are a few games Iâve made a custom profile for my mouse to drop to 400dpi just for those games.
Unless you play at high sensitivities Iâd honestly say anything over 800dpi is actually complete overkill.
I just want to make sure Iâm clear on your statement - you sound like you know what youâre talking about, but this statement kind of confuses me. Since pixel skipping is really a misnomer to begin with, the resolution someone plays at is really completely independent of this equation. A pixel only exists conceptually within the frame it was rendered, and the moment a new frame is generated from a new orientation of the camera (e.g. >= 1 tick of the mouse) you can no longer compare the two. The old pixel doesnât exist. Youâre rendering a completely new pixel which is shaded based on the camera and whatever geometry is projected in front of it.
A pixel takes up a certain amount of angular space on the screen (not usually the same angular space across the field of view, but for our purposes we only care about the angular space near the center of the field of view since thatâs where the apparent motion takes place).
The higher your actual resolution, the smaller an angle each pixel covers.
Similarly, each mouse âtickâ will move the field of view a certain angular distance. At equivalent eDPI (the same distance moved on the mouse is the same angle turned in-game), the lower DPI moves a larger angle per tick to accomplish that turn.
Once the angle to turn exceeds the angle covered by a pixel near the center of the screen âpixel skippingâ appears to happen. Of course itâs not actual pixel skipping in a first person game (although it is actual pixel skipping in other games) ; new pixels are rendered, yes, but the way they are rendered creates an illusion of motion, so that if you are turning left it appears as if the pixels are moving right.
If the angle a single tick moves you exceeds the angle a single pixel covers by 1.5x, then the crosshair will appear to âskipâ a pixel every other frame (or if you prefer, and slightly more accurately, the scene - near the crosshair - will appear to âmoveâ two pixels instead of one every other frame).
If you now increase your resolution (from 1080p to â4kâ), then you halve the angle that each pixel covers. Each tick of the mouse will make the scene appear to rotate 3 pixels with each tick. Now halve the resolution of the mouse, and each tick of the mouse will make the scene appear to rotate 6 pixels with each tick. (Of course, if you measure far from the crosshair, it will normally appear to rotate by more near the edges, although this is dependent on in-game camera, FOV setting, and display aspect ratio).
Anyway. Low DPI setting then has multiple effects. One is apparent pixel skipping for slow, smooth movements where a frame is rendered every mouse tick, the screen will apparently âjumpâ with each tick.
It will also âfeelâ more jumpy because the mouse moves further before a âtickâ is registered - at 400dpi, if 1/400th of an inch hasnât been traversed, then you wonât get any apparent movement, when it has youâll move in that moment the entire distance. At 1600dpi, you could render 4 different frames at smaller differences of angle in that same traveled distance.
Lastly, there are certain angles that you cannot land on. When moving very quickly your frame-to-frame change in angle will be more than a single mouse tick anyway, but since each tick moves you a certain amount, you might be able to turn e.g., at 400dpi, 8.4 degrees or 8.5 degrees, but not 8.45 degrees. At 1600dpi, you could turn 8.4, 8.425, 8.45, 8.475, or 8.5 degrees.
(Not actual numbers for any particular settings, but itâs on the same order of magnitude of actual numbers)
Whether you call it pixel skip or angle skip in this kind of flick-shot situation, the result is still the same: you canât place the crosshair as precisely at lower dpi (assuming the same eDPI).
Now, resolution does not really affect this last factor at all. In the flick-shot situation youâre already moving so fast that each frame is jumping considerably. In the smooth-travel scenario, though, screen resolution has a significant affect on feeling jumpiness and apparent pixel-skip.
Arguably, some of that âjumpinessâ is simply unavoidably built-in to lower resolution monitors with their larger pixels covering larger angles of the field of view, so you could say that as you increase resolution with a low mouse dpi, youâre just missing out on extra smoothness and not gaining extra jumpiness⌠but still, there is jumpiness that could be eliminated.
Well, that was a long explanation⌠which is why we usually just hand-wave it down to âitâs pixel skippingâ.
Oh, as for this, obviously, getting the right eDPI is very important. A little bit of jumpiness is almost always going to be less of a problem than having an oversensitive ⌠err⌠sensitivity.
OK this line is what clarified what you were saying for me. I guess from my perspective Iâve never really thought about it like that, since technically what gets rasterized on that pixel can change (rather drastically) even for âsub pixelâ rotations, so Iâve always thought about this problem as a fixed angle per mouse tick and nothing more. In my eyes every pixel you see on screen is a uniquely generated entity, not a representation of a frustum containing that pixel.
Well, when you, say, throw a red outline around an object to represent your target area, the apparent motion of objects on the screen in pixel distances becomes kind of important to many people.
That seemsâŚodd, I use 400 dpi and donât have anything like this. What mouse are using?
Just when I thought there was no intelligent life left in this place.
In all seriousness tho thanks for the detailed explanation - a lot of that I didnât know.
You guys get me confused.