Is High DPI Really Necessary?

[itlnstln]

The CEO of Steelseries discusses this on Ars Technica.  Check it.

[ch_123]

That's been their line for at least two years now, I think they measure their mice using Count Per Inch (CPI)

He touches on an important fact though, we have mice that are advertised as being capable of 4-5k + DPI, but who actually uses anything more than about 1.5-2 anyway?

[ricercar]

Sell your Nvidia stock while you're at it.

Faugh. NVIDIA and AT^h^hAMD will continue to fight it out in the console wars when PC gaming stops responding to resurrection.

[Shuki]

No high dpi is not necessary.

Next question please.

[kriminal]

mines goes up to 1600 but i feel having a dpi of 2000 is way more than enough. who uses dpi at 5000 anyways???

[Rajagra]

It's like the camera megapixel number. Sure, a high resolution is great, but not if the quality goes down as a result. And it often does.

2000dpi seems to be the sweet spot to me, or even lower depending what I'm doing.

And I'm going to keep calling it dpi for mice, we all know what it means. A pixel is a dot, a spot, a counted change in position. The mistake to  avoid making is the distinction between lpi (lines per inch) and dpi. Also dpi means something different with inkjet printers, because many dots are used for a single 'pixel' due to the need for dithering to mix colours.

[AvengeR]

it isn't necessary at all. It's another marketing trick from razer (especially razer with their bad quality and overpriced products) and others.

"the gaming example": if you look at pros most of them use mouses from 2001-2002, with the 1.1 sensor from microsoft (400 dpi, wheel mouse optical [quake], intellimouse and 3.0 [cs]) or logitech (logitech mini, for starcraft and war3).
Ofc they try to hide this since they can only make it to tournaments with money from sponsors, which benefit from publicity ("if a pro uses a razer mouse then I must too"). When kinzu was released (steelseries mouse) some pros used it on the beginning of a cs tournament, but on the final they changed to their old ones (old microsoft and logitech mx518, which is just a revamped version of mx500-510)

in short: no

offtopic: I´ve been testing some keyboards at work trying to find one with decent nkro, so it can handle W+D+E and W+A+Q. Nothing positive yet.

[hyperlinked]

mines goes up to 1600 but i feel having a dpi of 2000 is way more than enough. who uses dpi at 5000 anyways???

If you're a fingertip or claw hand mouser, the extra DPI is useful.

I'm a fingertip/claw hand and I use my Razer Imperator at 4000 dpi. I also run two 23" monitors side by side so there's a lot of real estate to cover. I tried going at 5000dpi for a while, but it was too jumpy so I bounced around between 2000 and 5000 for a while before settling in at 4000dpi.

However, if I was still gaming, that dpi would indeed be coming down. My favorite gaming mouse was an old fashioned 800dpi mechanical mouse which I found superior to any laser mouse because it provided something that we all love here: tactile feedback. It was easier to get a feel for how far you were moving the mouse... that's something I still miss even though I've adapted quite well to laser mice.

[In Stereo!]

I use

800 DPI on 1024x768
1000 DPI on 1280x1024
2000 DPI on 1920x1200

Where to use 5k DPI? On a really big screen.

[microsoft windows]

Actually it's the CMO or Chief Marketing Officer.  So not exactly someone I'd trust but yah, my son and I agree that the DPI wars are pretty silly.

The Ultimate Gaming Rig

Show Image

Someone's getting Win-dozed.

Now, those old serial mice are actually better than you all might think. This one here's good and sensitive.

But my gaming rig is better since my keyboard has a trackball.

Oh, and about DPI...having high DPI is great for printing pictures. You don't take it for granted when your printer prints images at 180x180 DPI.

[zwmalone]

It's not needed, but it is nice.  Even on my Presario 705us (1024x768 res), I leave my g500 at 5700dpi...  it just feels the best.

[In Stereo!]

You need like 5mm from side to side? :s A little to much sensitivity for my taste, I can tell you that.

[itlnstln]

Kishy, do you have a 3Dfx card in that rig?  The passthrough cable looks familiar.

[itlnstln]

I had an AWE 32 back in the day.  I kept it until the Soundblaster Live! came out.  I had an Orchid 3Dfx Voodoo2 card as well; it got upgraded to an Nvidia TNT2 at some point.  Good times, good times.

[ch_123]

On the balance of things, I think ASUS' sound cards are the best consumer cards. If you're into recording stuff, go for m-Audio. Every modern creative card I've come into contact with sucks balls and caused more problems than they were worth.

[Mercen_505]

I had an AWE 32 back in the day.  I kept it until the Soundblaster Live! came out.  I had an Orchid 3Dfx Voodoo2 card as well; it got upgraded to an Nvidia TNT2 at some point.  Good times, good times.

Oh man, the AWE32 was incredible! I paid a hefty $250 for it, getting it just about a week after it was released. I even had some extra RAM on it as well. I kept that puppy for a loooooooong time. The next sound card I got after that was a Audigy for something like $10... heh.

But anyway, OT I play with an old Logitech optical mouse at 800 DPI or thereabouts. I have no problems gaming with it, online or offline.

[itlnstln]

The AWE32/64 made games sound awesome back in the day when they were still using MIDI for in-game music.  It was night and day.  For me, it was almost the same experience as hearing computer with a soundcard for the first time.  Soundcards were cool back in the day.  Dolby Digital Live was the only other soundcard advancement that wowed me but not in the same way the AWE32 did.

[Mercen_505]

Even with old FM synth stuff you could set the chorus and reverb up and suddenly go from the old plingy notes to something significantly more robust. I have to agree, though, that it was such a huge jump all around. It's just something I take for granted these days, but once upon a time I was thrilled to get a game with soundcard support!

[ricercar]

Am amused to see 3Dfx 3D add ons are still around. There's a piece of me in that card.


When 3Dfx was a startup no one had heard of, my employer signed on as their first or second customer, for 3D accelerators on our 2D VGA chips. One evening back in 1996 or '7, about 4:45PM, 3Dfx wanted by 5PM a tech document we had been promising for about a month. I pulled a daughter card connector out of my ass--invented it on the spot based on our reference design--essentially optimized the connector for our line of GPUs. We died, they lived, and so did the connector. Alliance "Pro Motion" Graphics. Never heard of them? There's a reason.

[8_INCH_FLOPPY]

Show Image

That is one sexy case.

[audioave10]

As long as its a "big honkin case", I like it too.
My mouse has always been a standard MS but then I don't game online.

[NamelessPFG]

An STB BlackMagic 3D Voodoo2 12 MB, huh? I own one of those. Could use another just to find out what the big deal about SLI was, and hopefully the second one would have a passthrough cable and a SLI cable (if that isn't just a floppy drive cable).

Hell, if it's possible, I'd put 'em in with a Voodoo5 5500 I have lying around for maximum Glide compatibility and call it my 3dfxbox, but that would probably result in some nasty conflicts between V2 and V5.

(As for that daughter card connector, I can't say I recognize it. What's the shape? I don't think it's the VGA passthrough, or what appears to be a VESA feature connector on the V5 5500...)

Also, nice case, but it reminds me of how I've learned to loathe the AT form factor and the spaghetti wiring mess that ensues within-especially since my first PC that wasn't some sort of ancient CompuAdd IBM PC clone that had no chance of running Windows and used 5.25" floppies turned out to be a bottom-of-the-barrel build by my father. The AMD K6-2 350 wasn't bad or anything, but there was no excuse for the use of AT at the time since ATX was prevalent, and worse-the PC-Chips M598 mobo-has a truly AWFUL layout (such that I need to make some tight wiring runs in hard-to-reach spots and around expansion cards) and no AGP slot (to the point where I distinctly recall my father having to return an AGP graphics card after having forgotten and not doing the research in order to exchange it with a PCI card-an ATI Xpert 98, I think-that is now long gone because he apparently removed it before giving it back to me after I moved). Now the PSU seems to have some faulty wiring for the Molex drive cables and fans, such that I'm surprised the damn thing even works.

Small rant aside, on to sound cards: I'm rather glad that I have that AWE64 Gold ISA. Any game that uses its integrated wavetable MIDI sounds a hell of a lot better for music than FM synth. (Some of the earlier games don't, though-generally the sort that DO support the Gravis Ultrasound or Roland MT-32/CM-32/LAPC-I instead, neither of which I have.)

And, finally, back to the original topic: high mouse DPI isn't really necessary most of the time, but many games and apps have this problem with losing precision when you raise the mouse sensitivity. If you lower it so that the cursor/crosshair/etc. isn't skipping pixels every time you move the mouse enough for a single "count", but raise the DPI enough to compensate and put the overall sensitivity to a comfortable level, it makes precision work (or just long-distance headshots) that much easier.

[microsoft windows]

That is one sexy case.

[See post 8" FLOPPY's post on the previous page for the picture referred to in this post.]

That case is a real oldie. Turbo button? That's an i386 kind of situation.

I wonder if that computer's really got a 386 inside it...

[Computer-Lab in Basement]

*sigh* don't make me pull out pics of the Windows 98 Gaming Rig.

Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit ftw.

Love that game! Have played it since I was like 8 years old, and its still fun.

oh yeah, im back from my months vacation, so sad I wasn't here for when they banned MS Windows, lol he told me the whole story.

[paardvark]

I'd say its the opposite of neccesary. Unless of course you own 6 30" monitors and need to get from the start button to the "show desktop" button in Win 7.

[washuai]

I'd say it is all in how you define high DPI and what resolution/monitors/apps you're working with.  If you're defining high 5600 - 6000 on one 600x800 19" monitor, of course not, in fact as paardvark mentioned, it could even be detrimental.
For one 1920 x 1200 ish monitor, I like 1600 to 3600 dpi, because I like to move fast with precision and that's got nothing to do with gaming, even.
The Microsoft Trackball Explorer and Logitech Cordless Optical Trackman are too slow (too low dpi), imho for my 1680x1050 monitor.  Do I need faster?  Depends on how much I need to touch the trackball less and be more productive.  Do I want the CST, which will be able to take me where I want to go with a speed and precision that matches my ability to get there - hell yea.

[phillip]

I use 1000 dpi, 1920x1080, default windows sensitivity, 1.3 in game sens when i play cs.

just using the computer i'll use whatever dpi settings