Introduction To Mouse Accel For Competitive Gaming

Hey guys,

So, this blog will be about mouse acceleration and how it's actually a good thing for competitive level gamers.  I'm not talking about Windows "enhance pointer precision" or any mouse manufacturer's settings for mouse acceleration - they are all absolutely terrible and should never be used.

As a quick background, the first "good" acceleration (to my knowledge) was from Quake 3.  You could set a console variable to determine how much linear increase your sensitivity raised based on how fast you were moving your mouse.  Notably, Quake 3's mouse accel was independent of frame rate.  Many games that implement mouse accel fail to make it consistent when your frame rate flucuates, so you should avoid it in most titles.  Years down the road, QuakeLive added two other variables related to mouse acceleration that made it more than just good: an offset, and a sensitivity cap.



With an offset, you can specify that your mouse should feel like it has no acceleration when moving slowly.  Admittedly, I'm not using an offset these days, but it helps people ease into the world of mouse accel.  With a sensitivity cap, you can specify that your sensitivity should stop being raised past a certain point.  This means that in an FPS you can maintain your muscle memory for how much it takes to do a 180 degree flick and still tweak your sensitivity for the purposes of long to medium range tracking.

The options available in Quake3/QuakeLive were enough to have more than half of the top level pro players use it.  But, it was limited to just those games... until povohat wrote a driver that gives the same mouse acceleration options available to anyone in any game.  This blog is about that driver - installing it, configuring it, and any updates on it.  The driver has been available since 2013, but it is only recently picking up in popularity.  I'm finding myself answering a lot of the same questions over and over (it's very cool that people like the driver, but it's taking more of my time than I'd like - hence this blog).

And to introduce myself: I'm KovaaK.  I wrote the GUI to the driver that shows the curve of your mouse sensitivity and lets you save/use different profiles.  In gaming, I'm best known for playing QuakeWorld and Reflex competitively and my Youtube channel where I put out content teaching people how to play said games.