Why would you ever use a DPI over 1200 on a mouse?

[Zefar]

So I see a lot of mouses these days brag about how high the DPI goes. Thing is I keep mine around 1000 which is where it's at a good speed. Not too fast and not too slow.

Even going up to 1200 is too much. Let alone the 6000 DPI setting I can have on my optic mouse. Which is a SteelSeries Rival.

I've seen a mouse with 12 000 DPI. 12 000 DPI!!!! You'd be breaking the international space speed limit with that thing.
How is anyone ever going to get any use of it. A slight movement will make it fly into the sides of the screens.

Now I do know of ONE reason to have a high DPI. In Battlefield 2142 there where these escape pods you could use on a vehicle or the titan itself. With high enough DPI you could change it's direction.
That's the only reason I can ever see using high DPI.

[Ishan451]

You wouldn't. Its there for the sole purpose of being "better" for people that have no clue.

[Mr. Hemlock]

Art possibly? Who knows.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Mouse resolution is a resolution, not a speed. Improving it means your mouse can detect smaller movements: it's an improvement in control clarity in basically the exact same way that increasing display resolution improves image clarity: the recording device is recording more often, so you can get a more detailed picture.

Increasing resolution doesn't have to mean faster movement of your cursor/view - that's up to the software to decide, by changing how far it moves you for each distance the mouse detects (this is the mouse sensitivity setting in games and your OS, more or less). If you go from a 500 DPI mouse to a 1000 DPI mouse, you turn the sensitivity down by half and you're moving at the same speed as before - but now your movement is (potentially) smoother and more accurate; capable of finer-grained control.

Whether 1200 DPI matters to you over 1000, or 1000 matters over 800 or whatever, is really much the same question as whether 1080p matters to you over 720p, or whether 65fps is better than 55fps in a game. It's up to you at what point you decide "nah, this is good enough for me for this application".

[Zefar]

My previous mouse had a max DPI of 1800. My new mouse has 6000. It is no more precise than my old one when moving it real slowly. So even that point is probably just something companies made up. As there is most likely a limit.

Also it still doesn't answer my question as to why anyone would want to use 12 000 DPI let alone over 2000.

[Midnight Sky ✨🌙✨]

I can only think of specific games and situations where it would be helpful.

Like with how Metal Gear Solid V handles mouse sensitivity. There's a setting that controls the mouse sensitivity, but increasing it meant that the camera jumps all over the place. I don't think that makes sense, but I can't find a video that shows what I'm talking about... Anyway, I could turn the mouse sensitivity down so that the camera moves smoothly, then adjust the DPI to counter the now slow sensitivity.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Made up? Seriously? This is just about how a mouse physically works and how input is processed in computer programs. You can go read up on these things yourself instead of asking on a forum if you're interested, but nobody is lying to you.

Yes, you won't always notice a difference, especially when your previous one is already at 1800 resolution. There are multiple reasons for that. First, the limitations of your senses: the same way that people often don't think 80fps is a significant (or even noticeable, depending on the person) improvement on 60fps. It's not that there's "a limit" (well, there could be, but it's basically impossible to define universally, since humans vary); rather, there are diminishing returns on the usefulness of improving resolution. As I said, it's entirely up to you: if you decide the difference isn't important, then it's not important. If you decide it is, then it is. That's all that matters.

Second, the limitations of the software, and the hardware it's being displayed on. Well, I guess this is really the same point, from a different angle. Something like Windows will only ever move the cursor a minimum of one pixel. So detecting ultra-small distances (tiny fractions of that pixel) is probably, again, not going to be noticeable.

That last part also means that mouse resolution will likely need to gradually increase with things like screen resolution, so DPI values that seem ridiculously excessive now will have their place in the future, at least.

[Zefar]

I'm pretty sure the mouse caps out at a certain limit. Probably far less than what people believe.

Even when I put my mouse on the slowest setting I can see the individual movement as it's like moving along a grid but it's just a really tiny grid. I'm on a resolution 1920*1080 too.

I don't believe the resolution is going to go up all that much from this point on. Game companies these days often just give a crappy port where such resolution often isn't supported.

As for hardware and software limits. Mouse have most likely hit the limit a long time ago. Software? I believe we've reached that limit as well.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Originally posted by Zefar:

Even when I put my mouse on the slowest setting I can see the individual movement as it's like moving along a grid but it's just a really tiny grid. I'm on a resolution 1920*1080 too.

Well yes, the slowest setting is where you see pixellation the most, not the least. So it's not at all surprising that you see it "even at the slowest setting". That's like saying "even when I turn my monitor down to 640x480, I see chunky pixels". Of course you do! You've explicitly told the hardware to operate at a lower resolution. It's the high resolution where things get smooth.

And yes, if you turn your mouse's resolution up, you will often also see movement on a "grid" too. But that's from the other side of the coin: it's because you haven't turned the software's sensitivity down by the same factor. The software basically just takes the distance in "mouse pixels" the mouse tells it have been moved, multiplies it by the sensitivity, and that's how many pixels the cursor moves. Games like FPSs will be a bit different to that because movement might be controlling rotation rather than translation, but it's the same idea.

Now, with a high DPI mouse, it may be the case that software doesn't let you turn sensitivity down low enough to get nice smooth movement at a normal speed. But that's not a fundamental limit that can never be overcome, it's just that particular software not scaling to super-high mouse resolutions, much the same way that software often doesn't have options to scale things appropriately for super-high (or super-low) display resolutions. All you have to do to overcome that limit is use a smaller number for sensitivity than the smallest the software is currently using. It's that simple.

Originally posted by Zefar:

As for hardware and software limits. Mouse have most likely hit the limit a long time ago. Software? I believe we've reached that limit as well.

I don't know what you're talking about here, and I suspect you're not so sure either. What mouse limits were hit a long time ago? Mouse resolution is defined by the resolution of the mouse's camera. Are you saying it's not possible to create higher-resolution cameras than those in a mouse? Because that's...dead wrong. Software limits I already described: you just have to process smaller numbers. There's literally no limit to that.

I would really advise doing a bit of reading on how mice create input and how computers read it.

[Zefar]

Originally posted by Gus the Crocodile:

Well yes, the slowest setting is where you see pixellation the most, not the least. So it's not at all surprising that you see it "even at the slowest setting". That's like saying "even when I turn my monitor down to 640x480, I see chunky pixels". Of course you do! You've explicitly told the hardware to operate at a lower resolution. It's the high resolution where things get smooth.

The thing is, the mouse is moving as smoothly on 50 DPI as it is on 1000 DPI when I move it around slowly. My mouse has 6000 DPI as max limit too.
Putting it far higher makes it too hard to see as it'll far greater distance in a short amount of time.

Originally posted by Gus the Crocodile:

I don't know what you're talking about here, and I suspect you're not so sure either. What mouse limits were hit a long time ago? Mouse resolution is defined by the resolution of the mouse's camera. Are you saying it's not possible to create higher-resolution cameras than those in a mouse? Because that's...dead wrong.

When there isn't much difference on smoothness between 50 DPI and 1000 DPI when moving slowly I doubt making a mouse with 12 000 DPI is going to make any difference on the same DPI levels.
Also such high values are impractical and the limits of the camera inside the mouse is limited by the size of it. Same goes for the laser type mouse.

Originally posted by Gus the Crocodile:

Software limits I already described: you just have to process smaller numbers. There's literally no limit to that.

I would really advise doing a bit of reading on how mice create input and how computers read it.

I don't think the Software is going to get much better than it is now. They've been working with this for quite some time.

[Gus the Crocodile]

Originally posted by Zefar:

The thing is, the mouse is moving as smoothly on 50 DPI as it is on 1000 DPI when I move it around slowly. My mouse has 6000 DPI as max limit too.
Putting it far higher makes it too hard to see as it'll far greater distance in a short amount of time.

I don't know what "slowly" means to you, but the slower you move it, the less important resolution is, that's natural. In any case, as I said before, it's all about what's best for you: if you don't notice a difference at higher resolutions, then by all means don't use them, that's fine. Same with framerate or display resolution or any other fidelity control.

Originally posted by Zefar:

When there isn't much difference on smoothness between 50 DPI and 1000 DPI when moving slowly I doubt making a mouse with 12 000 DPI is going to make any difference on the same DPI levels.

First of all, just a quick thing since you mention it twice in this post: the maximum limit of the mouse doesn't matter here: a 12000 DPI mouse operating at 1000 DPI is functionally the same as a 1000 DPI mouse operating at 1000 DPI. So no, if you know you're happy with 1000 DPI, then you don't need the one that goes up to 12k.

Secondly, I've intentionally avoided talking about your example of a 12000 DPI mouse because it's a trivial extreme case, but if you'd like a clear statement on my opinion of such a device: I think it's completely unnecessary, for my purposes at least. I have no idea, maybe if you play twitch games on ultra-high-res monitors and you're a heck of a lot faster a player than me, such a thing starts to become useful, but I kind of doubt it even then. Either way, for me, on my 1080p monitor, my mouse stops at 5k DPI I think, and there are enough games that don't scale mouse sensitivity down enough that I never push it even close to that. Okay, I just checked, it's set on 1100 at the moment.

Originally posted by Zefar:

the limits of the camera inside the mouse is limited by the size of it. Same goes for the laser type mouse.

Yes, and the limits of the camera in an actual...camera, are also determined by how small it is, but that's never stopped higher resolution cameras from appearing. Simply pointing out that size is a factor in making better cameras doesn't demonstrate that cameras have hit a limit.

Originally posted by Zefar:

I don't think the Software is going to get much better than it is now. They've been working with this for quite some time.

You don't think smaller numbers can be processed than we process now? I'm afraid that's just a lack of understanding of software engineering on your part. Even if we assume that current games are using the lowest possible floating point values possible for their sensitivities (they won't be, for a number of reasons), that bound is only limited by how many bits you use to store the number (and how many bits you can feed to the processor).