Mouse Sensitivity Explained: DPI, eDPI, cm/360 and Why Pros Play Low

DPI (dots per inch) is the mouse sensor's resolution: how many counts it reports per inch of travel. 800 DPI sends 800 tiny movement messages per inch. It is a hardware setting, and it says nothing about how far the camera turns.

In-game sensitivity is the multiplier the game applies to each count. Every engine uses its own scale, which is why a 2.0 in CS2 and a 2.0 in Valorant have nothing to do with each other: CS2 rotates 0.022 degrees per count at sensitivity 1, Valorant 0.07 degrees.

eDPI is DPI multiplied by in-game sensitivity. It lets two players of the same game compare settings with different mice, and that is all it does; across games it is meaningless for exactly the reason above. cm/360 fixes that: it is the physical distance your mouse travels for one full rotation, and it is the only number that survives a change of game, DPI or mouse.

Most professional players in tactical shooters sit between 30 and 60 cm per full turn, which feels absurdly slow to someone coming from a desktop habit of flicking the cursor across two screens. The reason is precision: at 40 cm/360 a millimetre of hand movement is less than a degree of camera turn, so small corrections are possible and an overshoot costs little.

The price is arm movement. Low sensitivity needs a large mousepad and an aiming style from the elbow and shoulder rather than the wrist. Players who sit close to the desk or use a small pad hit the edge of it mid-turn and blame the sensitivity. The cure is the pad, not the number.

There is no correct value. Arena shooters with 180-degree turns favour faster settings, controller-style games with aim assist are a different world entirely, and a player with years on 25 cm/360 will not gain anything by copying a professional's 50. What matters is staying put long enough for the movement to become automatic.

Convert by cm/360, never by copying the slider. Read your current game's yaw (degrees per count), compute the distance for a full turn from DPI and sensitivity, then solve for the new game's slider so the distance is identical. The converter on this site does the arithmetic; the point of this section is that the method is the only one that works.

Field of view changes how a given cm/360 feels even when the number is identical, because the same rotation moves the crosshair across a different fraction of the screen. Players switching from a 90-degree game to a 103-degree game often feel slower and raise the sensitivity, then lose the muscle memory they were trying to protect. Convert first, play a week, then decide.

Scope and ADS sensitivities are a separate layer. Most games scale the hipfire value when zoomed, and the scaling method differs (monitor-distance matching versus a flat multiplier). Convert hipfire exactly and accept that zoomed aim will need its own short adjustment period.

Windows pointer speed must sit on the sixth notch (the default) with enhance pointer precision off; anything else adds acceleration outside the game's control. Raw input, where the game offers it, bypasses the operating system's pointer processing and should stay on.

Polling rate affects consistency rather than speed: a mouse reporting at 125 Hz delivers the same total movement as one at 1000 Hz, in larger, later chunks. Switching a mouse to its advertised rate is free and the polling rate test on this site shows what the browser actually receives.

Very high DPI with very low in-game sensitivity and very low DPI with high sensitivity produce the same cm/360 but not the same result. Low DPI discards fine movement as the sensor rounds to whole counts; extremely high DPI exposes sensor jitter and, in some engines, floating-point quirks. Between 800 and 1600 DPI is where neither problem shows.