What is the Best Mouse DPI to Improve my Aim in FPS Games?

Gaming mice come with a bewildering choice of resolutions. With a modern mouse, you might be offered a choice between 100 to 12,000 DPI. But which one should you choose and will it improve my aim?

Note: DPI (dots per inch) is the commonly used term to refer to mouse resolution when in fact CPI (counts per inch) is the technically accurate term. For the sake of consistency, we will stick with DPI

Will Changing the Mouse DPI Improve my Aim?

Finding the optimal setting for mouse dpi can improve your aiming potential. It won’t improve your aiming directly (unfortunately only practice can accomplish this) but it will remove potential obstacles to increasing your aiming ability. Even a world-class aiming pro will be hindered if he chooses a poor dpi setting. In particular, having your DPI too low (often the case if you are using a standard, non-gaming mouse) can have a significant negative impact on your aiming precision.

So What is the Optimal Mouse DPI setting?

There are two answers to this. A theoretical optimum and a practical optimum. The theoretical optimum can be calculated with some sweet math. The practical optimum tempers this with some practical considerations. So let’s start with the math (feel free to skip this section if you are not into this kind of thing). We’ll be conservative and calculate a ‘worst case’ scenario.

We need to start by calculating the total number of on-screen pixels it takes to do a full 360 turn:

Let’s assume you play on a high-resolution screen at a resolution of 3,840 pixels wide.

Nearly all of the popular games require 4 (or fewer) screen-widths to do a 360.

So 3,840 * 4 = 15,360 pixels per 3600.

We will also be conservative and assume you play with a high mouse sensitivity. As you can see here (link coming soon) this really ought not to be less than 11 inches (28 cm) per 360.

So 15,360 pixels per 11 inches = 1,400 dpi.

Except that’s not quite it. Due to something called Shannon’s law, we need to double it.

So in this scenario, something around 2,800 dpi would give us perfect one-to-one mapping between mouse movements and on-screen movements. There would be no loss of aiming precision whatsoever and any dpi higher than this would offer no additional benefit.

This was a very conservative estimate and even this is a LONG way below the maximum resolution offered by some mice (e.g. 12,000 dpi) so let's have a look at some more common display resolutions and sensitivities:

Table of Optimum DPIs

How to use this table: Look up your screen resolution and mouse sensitivity and find your maximum mouse dpi setting. Setting it any higher than this will not offer any additional benefit.

What about those practical concerns you were talking about?

The table above shows the theoretical optimum DPI settings, but in practice, you will likely not notice the difference vs. much lower settings. Why is that? Because a dpi setting of say, 2000 means the mouse will be sensitive to movements of 1/2000th of an inch (0.0127mm). That is an impossibly small distance and certainly smaller than any movement human is capable of consciously making.

You may also find that the practical considerations of high DPIs annoying. A DPI of 2,000 will be unusable outside of the game for things like web browsing so you will be forced to switch your DPI every time you go into a game.

So if you can’t (or choose not to) set your DPI as high as the numbers in the table above, don’t worry - it’s unlikely to have a noticeable effect on your game. But at least you now have the knowledge of the best theoretical mouse DPI for your set up.

With that in mind, it's time to improve your aim with some practice - head over to Aiming.Pro and get started!