What does DPI do on a mouse?

Question

What does DPI do on a mouse?

In: Technology

Answer 1

It’s the “sensitivity” of the mouse. Despite being often called DPI, it’s actually CPI, or “counts per inch”. When you move the mouse it will send signals to the PC like “move a pixel to the right”, then “move another pixel to the right”. Each of these pixels that it moves is a “count”. So CPI means the amount of onscreen pixels that your cursor should move for every inch that the mouse moves across the mousepad, for example 800 CPI means the cursor moves 800 pixels when I move my mouse by one inch. A higher CPI setting moves the cursor further than a lower CPI setting for the same amount of physical mouse movement.

It’s the same behavior as the windows pointer sensitivity or the sensitivity in a game. Higher CPI gives the same behavior as a high Windows or game sensitity.