Everything you need to know About polling rate? – Guide

When you’re playing games, it’s vital that your gear responds as quickly as possible. If you’re being bombarded with enemy bullets and you have to wait up to half a second for the mouse to report your movement to your PC, you might be dead before you can dodge. That’s why gaming mice advertise fast response times. The faster a mouse responds and reports its movements, the less input lag you will experience. A mouse’s polling rate is simply an indication of how many times (per second) a mouse reports its position to the PC. If you set the mouse to search at 500 Hz, it will report its position 500 times per second, or every two milliseconds. Most modern gaming mice let you choose the mouse polling rate and you can choose between 125, 250, 500 and 1000 Hz. Logic dictates that higher poll rate = better, but higher poll rate also comes greater load on your system (CPU more specifically) so depending on your configuration it might not be advisable to use Easy to Configure Mouse and forget about the highest polling rate possible to deal with. We’ve found that the vast majority of our reviewed pro players use an inquiry rate of at least 500, so we don’t recommend going below that.

500 vs. 1000Hz: Is the mouse polling rate better?

A higher mouse polling rate is generally considered better, but much more is needed if you want to see the difference between a 500Hz polling rate and a 1000Hz polling rate. You need to consider factors such as what you expect from a gaming mouse, your experience and skill level, and in some cases the response time of your gaming monitor. If you use the average gaming monitor, you can hardly tell the difference between a 500Hz and 1000Hz report rate. It’s only a 1ms deference, which means it’s pretty negligible. So we can sum it up like this: a 1000Hz polling rate is faster, while a 500Hz polling rate is smoother. If you use a higher polling rate, you will use more CPU resources. When there are not enough CPU resources, a higher polling rate – in this case, a polling rate of 1000Hz – can become unstable; in that case you would need to revert to a smaller and almost as effective, a 500Hz probe to assess.

How to Take a mouse polling rate test

To test what your gaming mouse poll rate is, use this online tool from Benq. In the tool, you will click on the page and be prompted to move your mouse. You should then have a good estimate of what your mouse’s average search rate is. Benq’s tool remains one of the best if you need a free online USB mouse survey rate checker.

How to Change mouse polling rate

Final note

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