Comparing a gaming mouse and a regular mouse

The com­put­er acces­sories mar­ket is con­stant­ly replen­ished with unusu­al devices. And it even affects mice. For exam­ple, they can be right- and left-hand­ed, touch-sen­si­tive, with a bunch of addi­tion­al but­tons, wired, wire­less, with a track­ball, fold­ing … And gam­ing mice stand apart.

Gam­ing mice are incred­i­bly expen­sive com­pared to reg­u­lar mice. For the price of a Raz­er Mam­ba, you can buy four Microsoft Sculpt Com­fort jokes or two dozen Log­itech B100s. What is the pecu­liar­i­ty of gam­ing tech­nol­o­gy? What is the dif­fer­ence between a gam­ing mouse and a reg­u­lar mouse? Con­sid­er in this arti­cle.

A brief excursion into the life of computer mice

In gen­er­al, the answer to the ques­tion posed in the title of the arti­cle can be giv­en in a sin­gle phrase with­out a can­vas of text below. It sounds like this — “Gam­ing mice have con­fig­urable DPI, high­er polling rate, high­er defined accel­er­a­tion, addi­tion­al con­fig­urable but­tons, some­times adjustable weight and liftoff detec­tion.” Now let’s start to under­stand what this actu­al­ly means.

It would seem that the main task of a com­put­er mouse is to move the cur­sor and make clicks. And this approach is fair in prin­ci­ple — but only if all gam­ing is lim­it­ed to unfold­ing the “Ker­chief” at lunchtime. When it comes to real­ly dynam­ic, dri­ving games, espe­cial­ly eSports, an ordi­nary mouse sim­ply can­not cope with the tasks. She’s too slow, too uncom­fort­able.

One of the fea­tures of gam­ing mice - con­fig­urable DPI. DPI, or dots per inch (dots per inch) is, in fact, the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the manip­u­la­tor. The high­er this indi­ca­tor, the small­er move­ments the mouse is able to deter­mine. Set DPI to 5000 — and the cur­sor will fly from cor­ner to cor­ner of the screen at the slight­est move­ment. Set DPI to 300 — and you have to clear the table so that the mouse has some­where to ride.

Cus­tomiz­able DPI is very impor­tant for gamers. In dynam­ic bat­tles, high mouse sen­si­tiv­i­ty is required, and in strate­gies it can be reduced in order to select units nor­mal­ly. In this case, it is worth dis­tin­guish­ing between the “Point­er move­ment speed” in the mouse set­tings and the actu­al DPI. The first is the soft­ware sen­si­tiv­i­ty set­ting, which may not work ade­quate­ly in games, and the sec­ond is the actu­al, phys­i­cal para­me­ter, the same regard­less of the pro­gram and envi­ron­ment.

Now to polling speed. This para­me­ter deter­mines how often the mouse con­troller will deter­mine the posi­tion of this very mouse, and send infor­ma­tion about this to the com­put­er. The stan­dard polling rate for con­ven­tion­al manip­u­la­tors is 300 Hz, that is, 300 times per sec­ond. In gam­ing, it ris­es to 1000 Hz, that is, 1000 times per sec­ond.

How it works in con­junc­tion with DPI:

1. In the first cycle, the mouse con­troller deter­mines its posi­tion rel­a­tive to the irreg­u­lar­i­ties on the table or rug, and sends infor­ma­tion about this to the com­put­er;

2. After 1/1000 (or 1/300, if you have a reg­u­lar mouse) sec­onds, the con­troller deter­mines the changed posi­tion — how far and in which direc­tion the mouse has trav­eled. Infor­ma­tion about this is trans­mit­ted to the com­put­er;

3. The dis­tance trav­eled by the mouse in dots per inch is also trans­mit­ted to the com­put­er;

4. The cur­sor moves to the spec­i­fied dis­tance.

It is clear that the high­er the polling fre­quen­cy, the more often the move­ment is deter­mined. It fix­es more accu­rate­ly and faster. That is, the mouse is able to catch even the slight­est, very short move­ment.

But what if the mouse moves very fast? So fast that the con­troller is not able to accu­rate­ly cal­cu­late the dis­tance between two points — at the begin­ning of the mea­sure and its end? And this actu­al­ly hap­pens dur­ing espe­cial­ly intense sports bat­tles.

And now it comes to defined accel­er­a­tion. This para­me­ter deter­mines to what speed the mouse can be accel­er­at­ed so that it detects move­ment ade­quate­ly. For con­ven­tion­al manip­u­la­tors, it rarely exceeds 1G, that is, about 10 meters per sec­ond. For top gam­ing, it can reach up to 9G, that is, instant accel­er­a­tion — about 90 meters per sec­ond.

In addi­tion, it deter­mines the reli­a­bil­i­ty. If you pull an ordi­nary mouse from rest at a speed of 90 m / s, then most like­ly it will sim­ply crum­ble — the iner­tia of the inter­nal com­po­nents will pull them out of the board or case.

Of course, in real­i­ty, 90 m / s is an extreme­ly dif­fi­cult accel­er­a­tion. Even dur­ing esports com­pe­ti­tions. But in par­tic­u­lar­ly intense com­pe­ti­tions, 2G or 3G is quite achiev­able.

Anoth­er impor­tant para­me­ter of gam­ing mice – deter­mi­na­tion of the sep­a­ra­tion height. The manip­u­la­tor rarely lies on the table dur­ing active use. More often it comes off the sur­face and is trans­ferred to a new place. And some mice define it as move­ment.

In some gam­ing mod­els, you can con­fig­ure the behav­ior when you leave the table. The mouse can either detect this as a move­ment or ignore it. This is con­ve­nient because it allows you to get rid of erro­neous move­ments.

Also for con­ve­nience, some gam­ing mice equipped with cus­tomiz­able but­tons. A num­ber of mod­els have more than a dozen of them! Quick actions can be hung on these addi­tion­al but­tons so as not to be dis­tract­ed from the game­play — reload­ing, using spells, some char­ac­ter skills, and so on. Top-end mice also sup­port macros — you press one but­ton, and the hero of the game begins to per­form a whole series of actions. It is also very con­ve­nient.

And final­ly, adjustable weight also for con­ve­nience. Some­one likes mice heav­ier, some­one — eas­i­er. But this is already the indi­vid­ual char­ac­ter­is­tics of the user.

Which is better — a regular mouse or a gaming mouse?

As you can see from the above fea­tures, gam­ing mice are aimed at pro­fes­sion­al gamers who need fast, prac­ti­cal and con­ve­nient devices. To put it mild­ly, all this is not real­ly nec­es­sary for ordi­nary users. Even if you plan to play just in the evenings, in some “Tanks” or “Heroes”, the game con­troller will be a waste of mon­ey.

But for e‑sportsmen and fans of mul­ti­play­er games, a gam­ing mouse is need­ed. With it, they will achieve new heights!