Sensitivity
Accurate shooting
Sensitivity
Sensitivity is rather simple. The higher sensitivity you have, the more your cursor or crosshair will move upon moving the mouse. The right sensitivity is a personal preference, but the basic concept to this is: The lower your sensitivity is, the more accurately you will be able to shoot and keep your crosshair on targets. There is an easy way to see if you are playing on too high sensitivity: If you record your shooting, play it back and pay attention to where your crosshair is. If you see it zigzagging from left to right of the target and not staying on the target, you are probably using too high sensitivity. Keep in mind that there is no real benefit in running with high sensitivity, you do not need to be able to do instant 180-360 degree turns. You are going to be looking towards the enemies. If there’s a competent enemy behind you, you will be dead before you can turn.
DPI (dots per inch)
DPI is a bit more complicated than sensitivity, but it has the same concept for our usage. The higher your DPI is, the more your cursor or crosshair will move upon moving the mouse. Most of the proper mice come with an option to change the DPI either from a button on the mouse or from a driver/software you download for it. Probably the most commonly used DPI by FPS players is 800. If you are running high DPI, you would need to run lower sensitivity to reach the same kind of mouse speeds than on lower DPI. If you have a button to change DPI on the fly, you should not be changing it. Just stick to one DPI and roll with it. If there is a full city map with close combat only, it is smart to make DPI just little higher- also depending on your play style and the different classes.
Mouse smoothing
Mouse smoothing/acceleration should always be disabled:
If you have this enabled, it means your cursor/ crosshair will accelerate differently depending on how fast you move the mouse. This will lead to different results each time you move your mouse which will drastically mess with your muscle memory. There is a setting in windows called “Enhance pointer precision, which is automatically enabled. What this does is it fixes your mouse movement to be more of a straight line. This is bad to have enabled since windows would correct your mouse movement, making the cursor/ crosshair not aim where you intended to. Make sure you disable it. You can do this by opening control panel -> mouse -> pointer options
Zoom sensitivity scaling
This setting means that you can have different sensitivity when you aim down your sights than when handling the gun from the “hip”. This should be disabled or set to 1.00x for the same reason why you’d want to keep smoothing off. It will drastically mess with your muscle memory and make it harder to flick to the target from the hip into a sight.
