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This is kinda a blog post to vent some steam about my frustration with people and their high DPI mice.
So what I'll basically be doing here is explaining what DPI means and how it affects our computing experience, then I'll tell you all about the current trends in top end mouse products and why (I think) high DPI mice are just using DPI as a gimmick to suck you all in.
What Is DPI?
DPI stands for "dots per inch" (otherwise known as CPI or "counts per inch", which is probably a better term) and the way it works is, a mouse will record a "step" (think of the step as the dot part of DPI) after it has been moved a certain distance. This step is fed to your computer to tell it to move the mouse cursor one pixel.
So one step (or dot) = one pixel. If you have a 1600 DPI mouse, you need to move it just 1/1600th of an inch before your cursor moves one pixel. To look at it another way, move your mouse one inch and you will move your cursor across 1600 pixels. This dot to pixel relationship will be very important later on.
If you have a lower DPI, you will need to move your mouse further before it registers a step, and the opposite is true for a higher DPI mouse.
The other thing to consider is software interpolation. If the Windows mouse sensitivity is not set on the middle notch and / or mouse acceleration is enabled, then you will not get the 1:1 dot to pixel ratio. With mouse acceleration this ratio will always vary depending on the speed you move the mouse at. If you decrease the mouse sensitivity in Windows, you are essentially dividing, which will always have rounding errors. This is not ideal but it still gives adequate accuracy (rounding errors are tiny). If you increase the mouse sensitivity in Windows you will be in trouble. Increasing means multiplication. Let's say you double the mouse sensitivity in Windows. Your 1600 DPI mouse still reports a step after moving 1/1600th of an inch but Windows interpolates this as 2 pixels. That in itself is fine, but what if you move the mouse 1/3200th of an inch? Nothing happens. Your cursor cannot move less than 2px at a time. Same sensitivity, but less accuracy.
The DPI Race
Mouse manufacturers nowadays seem to want to cram the highest possible DPI sensors into their mice. This is basically just a marketing gimmick. People read "8000 DPI" on the box and think the mouse will perform better than the lower DPI mice.
Now don't get me wrong, higher DPI has its uses. If you have a super high resolution screen, you'll have more pixels crammed into your monitor than most, and so your pixel density will be higher (think about the Retina MacBook Pro). In this situation, a higher DPI mouse will allow you to maintain a decent sensitivity, the goal being you don't need to move the sensitivity notch up from the default position - you keep the 1:1 ratio. That and if you really hate moving your mouse, a higher DPI will let you move your cursor a great distance without much hand movement. It can also be useful for DPI switching in a game like CoD when you get stunned by a grenade and the game forces your sensitivity lower. But I don't DPI switch and I still win 9/10 games and I am a seasoned CoD player, so it isn't neccesary.
Why It Is Silly
All that is fine and dandy but the important thing to remember is higher DPI does not make a better mouse. After a certain point having a higher DPI is useless. Try using an 8000 DPI mouse with a 1080p monitor without lowering the sensitivity. Yeah, it is almost impossible to control. Try it at 1440p... that's right, still out of control. 8000 DPI is useless for just about all practical purposes. It's probably even too sensitive for DPI switching purposes.
But the big issue I have with high DPI mice is not how irrelevent they are, it is what is compromised in order to achieve this higher DPI. That's right, I have a big problem with laser sensors. Laser sensors have always been able to accomplish higher DPIs than optical sensors. On the box, laser mice look way better than optical mice due to the whole DPI comparison thing but that simply is not the case. Ask around on enthusiast forums and you will realise that most professional competitive gamers (the guys that get paid large sums of money to win) use low DPI optical mice due to their better perfect control speeds and lack of acceleration (many actually use a Windows Mouse Optical, which is more than 10 years old and has 450 DPI - I've tried it and it works great for low sensitivity uses). Laser sensors usually have positive or negative acceleration. They have a higher "control speed", which means you can move the mouse faster than an optical mouse before it can't register movement anymore, but from my experience they usually have a lower perfect control speed, so they start to experience acceleration issues before optical mice do. Again, don't get me wrong, there are plenty of optical mice with the same kinds of issues (usually cheap ones), but at least a few of these issues are inherent in all laser mice (including expensive ones). Optical mice also don't work on glass surfaces like a few laser mice do but if you're reading this, you shouldn't be using such a surface...
Conclusion
In the end, it is best to ignore the packaging and marketing and look at ALL of the numbers before you make your decision. If you are a low sensitivity gamer, you should realise that 1600 DPI is more than enough (I'm a medium-low sensitivity gamer and I use 1050 DPI at 1440p with the sensitivity two notches down and at 2.5/10 or 3.5/14 in CoD) and you should be far more concerned with jitter and perfect control speeds than anything else. If you are a casual gamer or high sensitivity gamer (yes, I'm putting you guys in the same bracket, hahah) then by all means use the DPI that you require but just remember that if you have to notch the sensitivity down, you're just wasting DPI.
Phew, that's a lot of stuff I just wrote. I should probably add that some of it is based on my experience with mice and is down to personal taste and is aimed at FPS gamers more than anyone else. I just hate seeing people ask on forums about the best mouse to use for their purposes and everyone gives completely wrong facts and the guy ends up getting his 5th high DPI laser mouse and hates it and wonders what's wrong with his aim.
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I play StarCraft II competitively (not professionally, though), and I can't perform well at all without really high sensitivity. I have a mouse with a DPI that is somewhere between 5000 and 8000, I can't recall which. I don't know about my Windows settings, but I have my mouse operating at almost full speed.
For me to move my mouse from the far left of my 1080p screen to the opposite side, I have to move my mouse an inch and a quarter (yes, I measured). This still feels less than ideal for my gaming. I'd be more comfortable with something closer to 2cm instead of 3.
Because I've used high sensitivity for so long, I have no problem controlling my mouse in any application. It takes more muscle control to be precise at high sensitivities, but after operating at high sensitivity for so long I'm very comfortable using it.
So I don't think the DPI race is silly in the sense that high-sensitivity mice are useless. They are making mice with those specs for gamers/power-users like me who like that. For people that like to navigate Windows by flinging their arm far off to the left and leaning in that direction, that is fine, it is simply a different market. If your problem is that manufacturers market high-DPI mice to non-high-sensitivity users, that is a completely different topic. The consumer is as responsible as the distributor (moreso, in my opinion), so that would be difficult to argue.
In the end, it is simply misinformed consumers who don't know which mouse they need to be buying, so they go for something that they feel comfortable buying. If that means it is expensive and flashing big numbers, so be it. People spend tens of thousands of dollars on cars for similar reasons, so it is nothing new. An informed buyer, however, is not "scammed."
I don't think you blame mouse manufacturers for trying to cater to their buyers, even if they do it in a misleading way.
I am pretty much solely a first person player and so that is where my perspective is coming from (as everyone can probably tell), and so I was aiming my arguments at manufacturers who clearly promote products for this market. Some examples: Razer Mamba (note the term "Free to Frag", which is in direct relation to FPS games), Razer Taipan (talks about how the sensor will make it easier to get headshots -which is not true, it won't- another FPS term). When I actually fish for examples it is hard to find any that stand out but when you actually look at what FPS gamers are buying (browse threads, talk to friends, etc.), most of them go for the highest DPI mouse they can find and then when I ask, they apparently have the Windows and in-game sensitivity turned right down. The purpose of this journal entry was to try to inform people that DPI does not make a mouse. If you don't need to go above the halfway notch in Windows or in-game to be comfortable, you don't need a higher DPI mouse... it is as simple as that.
Higher DPI is not a technological improvement so much as a personal preference (and therefore an improvement in the customisation aspect of the mouse... which has diminishing returns because very few people will need super high DPI mice so with each advance in DPI you get a smaller audience that it benefits). It cannot be considered better than a lower DPI mouse based on just that one spec. Most of the time many other aspects of the sensor are compromised in order to increase the DPI.
So yeah, although my post was oriented towards first person gaming, everything I said still stands. Lower sensitivity / DPI gaming has more benefits than higher sensitivity / DPI gaming (even in RTS games to a less noticeable extent). But just because one way is technically better does not mean you have to use it. People recommend the DVORAK keyboard layout as a better alternative to QWERTY for typing, but it doesn't mean we are all going to use it. I am comfortable with QWERTY, you are comfortable with high sensitivities.
Aside from that, I have a 200dpi slot for very fine Photoshop retouching and a 5700dpi slot because that slot is empty, so might as well as keep it.
Another thing I like about Logitech's software is that I can control the strength of acceleration (much like I can using X.org in Linux, but I digress). I run without acceleration myself, since I have dedicated dpi switching buttons for when I need to speed up/slow down my mouse but some may find it useful.
For example, if I want to aim with a scoped rifle, I just don't move the mouse very much. If I want to run around as usual, I'll be moving the mouse a lot more. I usually use Photoshop on a daily basis and so having a naturally low DPI mouse and that being what I'm accustomed to, I find it easy to do precise pixel editing.
That said, there is only so far you can move your mouse before you need to reposition it and so in games where the sensitivity is forcefully lowered due to stun effects or being in a vehicle, I would benefit from a DPI switch. Luckily, that doesn't occur often enough for it to be an issue.
I generally find it very unnatural to DPI switch because I'm so accustomed to one exact sensitivity, if it suddenly doubles, I require a bit of time to get used to it and to go back... so I do it the old fashioned way with a bit pad and larger mouse movements.
I'm personally more of a wrist movement person, so I don't move much, but I move accurately, so high dpi ftw.
On that note, watching my friends play shooters on my computer at 2400dpi is funny as hell for those used to the 400-800dpi range XD.
In the scheme of things, even 2400DPI is "low" by today's standards, which is silly because you need more than 6 million pixels to make use of it with a high sensitivity user. I "only" have 3.6 million pixels (1440p) and I have a notched down 1600 DPI and very low in-game sensitivities.
As I said, anything below 2400dpi is useless on a 5760x1200 setup D:
The only way to game at 5760x1080 is in surround mode (or whatever it is called these days) and that mode only uses the centre screen for mouse input so it is as if you're only using one monitor. Gaming mice is basically what my journal entry was about.
Higher DPI would make a bit more sense when using those three monitors for other things besides gaming.