Help With Mouse Settings for Steelseries Rival

Flatout42 · February 4, 2014

Hi guys, so tomorrow my Steelseries Rival comes in the mail with my new Steelseries Qck Mass mouse pad. Currently I have the Logitech G500 with a Razer Vespula(horrible). I need help understanding the new settings that will be available for me to customize on my new Rival. Currently on my G500 I use 1200dpi at a 1000hz polling rate.

What is the polling rate?

Also what is the Acceleration, Deceleration, and Angle Snapping settings?

I know CPI and DPI.

Thanks!

Verne · February 4, 2014

Polling rate is how often the mouse sends data to the CPU to process, much like refresh rate of monitors. Normal USB2 spec is 125Hz, but gaming peripherals usually let you overlock it to 250, 500 or 1000 Hz. You might see a difference up to 500 Hz, but going from 500 to 1000 Hz is not really noticeable. Higher polling rate also requires more CPU power, so going all the way to 1000 Hz can affect your FPS in games. On some hardware configurations 1000 Hz might also make your mouse cursor act erratically.

Acceleration and Deceleration make the cursor move faster/slower depending how fast you move your mouse. This can be bad for gaming, especially for FPS games since you might not always turn the same amount with the same distance the mouse travels. Most people prefer having zero acceleration to keep their movement constant and reliable. Most laser sensors used today always have a small amount of acceleration on the hardware side, even if fully disabled in software.

Angle snapping is a technique that tries to make your mouse move in a straight line if the software thinks that's what you are trying to do. Once again, bad for gaming as it reduces your accuracy since it "locks" you into a one-pixel line. For example, if you put the angle snapping setting to maximum, you would do squares on the screen when you tried to do circles with the mouse.