I have the sensitivity slider set to 1 (out of 100) and at max DPI I can still spin around 5 times by moving the mouse from one side of my pad to the other.
Unreal Engine is more than capable of handing this properly. All it would take to fix this is a little box next to the slider on the UI which accepts a decimal input (in my case I’d want to set it to about 0.2). It truly amazes me how AAA game studios have consistently failed to comprehend that this is an issue for the last 20 years…
Anyway, has anybody found a config file which we can edit to properly adjust mouse sensitivity yet?
Ugh, I’m not finding anything in the usual places (AppData, ProgramData, Program Files, etc.). The only registry entries which I’m finding for “borderlands” point to the executable as well.
Have they decided to hash or encrypt the config files somewhere, or am I just not searching hard enough?
This sounds like a mouse DPI issue
I can switch my dpi at will and i have it at 1000 and i lowered the games sensitivity to about 11. See if u can lower your mouses sensitivity for sure
Yes, of course I can, but I paid for a good mouse so that I could have a higher precision. Expecting users to nerf their hardware to accommodate a poor UI seems backwards.
DPI controls the physical polling rate of the hardware. Higher-end mice have the ability to poll more quickly and thus provide more accurate readings in respect to where your hand has moved the mouse to at any given point in time. This is equivalent to higher-end monitors having a faster refresh rate or high-performance gaming servers adjusting the tic-rate (game states calculated per second) to a higher value. Lots of consumers (gamers) aren’t aware of or don’t understand these things because the quality improvement is very subtle and they themselves might not notice it.
Sensitivity is supposed to be a scalar which multiplies every update from the mouse by a virtual value which translates into updated cursor coordinates in a 2D environment or how much your character turns in a 3D environment. This is the number that we should be able to adjust in order to get the desired experience.
It’s unfortunate that adjusting the DPI (AKA: reducing the mouse’s internal performance) is still the norm. It shows that lots of game developers (and apparently gamers) still don’t understand how this works, even though high performance mice have been around for ~20 years.
It’s also unfortunate that every new game that launches with this issue (lack of proper sensitivity control) leads to people feeling the need to defend that status quo because they don’t personally care about high DPI or use a low enough sensitivity for it to matter to them.
Its not just mouse sensitivity, controller sensitivity is still ridiculously high even when set to 1, especially for aiming down sights. Its not a question of being fussy about dpi, the sensitivity options in game need to be looked at again.
Yep… snipers are borderline useless on console IMHO and I usually play on a higher-ish sensitivity. Your ADS and reg sens setting have absolutely no effect on the high zoom sniper scopes for w/e reason. Definitely needs tuning. But yea, try changing your setting to literally see nothing change with the scope sens, it’s hilarious how pathetic of an oversight this is and clearly proves that people either didn’t test or pay attention to snipers at all lol
My last reply was 4 days ago… Now You are pushing Me to check this post again, and again, reply. If You’re feeling that My reply hurted your feelings then flag it… Did You read forum rules for what that flag is?
Sayiing “stop replying” is also “rude”.
?? Dpi doesn’t control polling rate, your mouse software should lol. If you want more precision you should increase your polling rate. Dpi = dots per inch and is more or less sensitivity. Polling rate is how often the mouse reports it’s position back to the computer.
I think you may have a minor misunderstanding - read more here:
I meant “poll” in the general sense of the word. As in: the rate at which the mouse takes readings on the surface in front of it. I didn’t mean to conflate this with the USB clock speed (which also happens to be referred to as the “polling rate”) Perhaps I should have chosen a different word. Let’s just call it the “update rate”.
The way it works is like this: Every time the mouse detects that it’s moved a “dot” (an arbitrary unit of physical resolution on your desk which has nothing to do with pixels), it registers an update in that direction. In this way, the update rate (or “polling rate” as I was previously calling it) is directly controlled by the DPI setting. A lower DPI means that the dots are farther apart and the updates occur less frequently.
As the updates are recorded by the mouse drivers they track two separate numbers for +/- x and +/- y. Every time the USB port is read these totals are sent to whatever software is interacting with the mouse driver. This happens once every 8ms at 125hz (the default) or once every millisecond at 1000hz (the standard for most gaming mice). The software (IE: Borderlands 3) which receives these updates can do whatever it wants with those +/- totals, but it typically just multiplies them by a sensitivity number and translates them into in-game viewing angle adjustments.
This process ends up making DPI feel like it’s only adjusting the sensitivity, because more frequent updates end up causing the +/- totals to have higher net values. The game then ends up translating these into larger angle adjustments per USB cycle than you’d get with a lower DPI.
If you were to lower your DPI to something horrible like 10 you’d absolutely start to notice the lack of precision. It’s arguable that anything above 1000 DPI or so is unnoticeable and does effectively translate to a sensitivity adjustment, but I guarantee that at a technical level it’s also more physically precise.
The DPI setting is the number of dots on screen that your mouse will move for every inch of physical movement of the mouse.
So, a setting of 100 DPI will move the mouse 100 dots on screen for every 1 inch of movement on your desk.
So, a really high setting like 36000 will move the cursor 36000 dots for every 1 inch of mouse movement on your desk. Just a little tiny mouse movement will result in the cursor moving a long distance.
This is why professional gamer almost always use a 400 DPI or 800 DPI mouse setting and then adjust the sensitivity in game. It’s harder to track movement with a mouse if every tiny little movement of the mouse results in huge movements on screen.
Now does it become more clear why running a really high DPI setting makes your game harder to control? DPI and Sensitivity are two entirely different things. DPI is a measurement of how far your cursor will move for every inch of mouse movement. Sensitivity is a setting of how many times the mouse is polled within a given time frame. The mouse is being polled even if the mouse is not moving, DPI has NOTHING to do with polling rate.
At least you can turn your DPI down on PC. I typically play most games around 400 DPI, and adjust sensitivity in game to better tune if needed. Most games no need for over 1600 DPI at the very max, and that is for very, very, fast movements.
Close! It sounds like you understand both concepts (DPI and sensitivity), but you’ve got them swapped with each other.
“The DPI setting is the number of dots on screen that your mouse will move for every inch of physical movement of the mouse.”
A simple test can disprove this. Try lowering your resolution to the minimum and see if that increases your mouse speed. It won’t. Pixels on your screen are unrelated to DPI.
All this doubt has me double-checking my understanding (as it should). I just did some tests to confirm:
Lowering the DPI to 100 causes the effective sensitivity to be reduced as well. Increasing the in-game sensitivity makes it very obvious that the mouse is less precise at an equivalent speed (Turning on “mouse smoothing” helps this somewhat, but mouse smoothing works by interpolation, predicting the direction your mouse was headed between updates instead of using your real input, so it should be left off for a test like this). At a low DPI the mouse jumps around between each update and the cursor jumps several pixels at a time. This is expected since the mouse is updating less and the physical precision is more coarsely grained (more distance between each dot). Increasing the DPI to 200 and halving the sensitivity improved the quality, but it was still noticeably less smooth than at max DPI.
Lowering my monitor resolution from 1440p to 720p did not double the effective sensitivity (as implied by a couple of previous posters). My effective sensitivity was exactly the same (about 40cm per 360 degree turn). Again, DPI has nothing to do with pixels.
Apparently even pro gamers who play at 400-800 DPI have a serious misunderstanding about how this works. They’d get more precision by increasing their DPI and decreasing their in-game sensitivity accordingly.
Unfortunately we keep getting games like this where it’s easier to adjust the effective sensitivity by changing DPI settings in the mouse software than it is to simply change the in-game sensitivity. The very idea of a DPI button is in part a workaround for all of these poor GUIs which only allow control via sliders in a restricted range instead of allowing players to enter exact numbers.
