Setup and Gear

Good aim training starts with gear and settings that do not interfere with practice. None of it requires expensive hardware.

• Fit beats sensor. A mouse that matches your hand matters more than its spec sheet.
• Cover your sensitivity range. A pad too small forces you to lift mid-turn.
• Sit in a position you can hold. Comfort over a full session beats any single piece of gear.
• Turn acceleration off. Raw input on, mouse and Windows acceleration off.

Explanation¶

Mouse: shape and weight over sensor. Nearly every modern gaming mouse sensor is accurate enough that most players can't feel the difference. So the sensor spec sheet matters far less than fit.¹

RTINGS' testing reaches the same conclusion: "most people won't notice any difference in movement delay between mice".²

Shape matters most. A mouse that doesn't match your hand size and grip style is uncomfortable to use, however good its sensor.¹

Weight is a smaller, personal factor after shape. Some players prefer very light mice for lower inertia. Others find them harder to control.¹

Mousepad: control versus speed surfaces. Pad surfaces trade glide against stopping power.

• A speed surface uses a low-friction weave for fast, consistent glide in every direction.
• A control surface uses a denser weave that adds drag, for finer, more deliberate movements.
• A balanced surface sits between the two.¹¹

Pad size matters alongside surface. A pad too small to cover your full sensitivity range forces you to lift and reset your mouse mid-turn.

Grip styles. No grip is strictly correct. Pick the one that lets you hold a comfortable, repeatable position for as long as you play.³

• Palm grip rests your whole palm and fingers on the mouse and moves it mostly from the forearm and elbow. It is the most stable and comfortable, with less wrist mobility.¹²
• Claw grip keeps the heel of your palm on the back while your fingers arch onto the buttons. It balances stability and mobility, but can tire the fingers over long sessions.¹²
• Fingertip grip touches the mouse with your fingertips only and moves it with fingers and wrist. It allows fast micro-adjustments, with less stability.¹²

In a 2024 study of 22 male players using their own grips, grip made no significant difference to flicking or tracking performance.⁴ Its tracking target moved at a constant speed, so that result is narrower than it sounds.

Posture and arm position. Your wrist position, and how long you hold it, matter more for comfort than which mouse or keyboard you use.⁵

Keep your upper arm relaxed against your torso, elbow supported, rather than reaching or lifting your shoulder to use the mouse. Keep your screen roughly an arm's length away, with your eyes meeting near the top quarter of the monitor.⁵

A setup you can comfortably hold for a full practice session does more for your consistency than any single piece of gear.

Monitor refresh rate and FPS. A higher refresh rate reduces the time between frames the display can show. For example, a 240Hz display refreshes roughly 2.8ms faster per frame than a 144Hz display.

Blur Busters' testing also found that running your in-game frame rate above your monitor's refresh rate, with V-Sync off, still measurably reduces input lag.⁶

So both help you see and react to targets sooner: a higher refresh-rate monitor, and a frame rate that comfortably exceeds it.

A monitor's own input lag is a small part of the total. RTINGS' testing finds that peripherals "add more latency than the monitor".⁷

Essential settings¶

Raw input: on. With raw input enabled, a game reads mouse movement more directly from the device, instead of only through the Windows pointer path. That makes sensitivity more predictable.⁸

Turn it on in any first-person or third-person shooter that supports it. It is no substitute for a clean sensor or stable frame times, but it is worth checking.⁸

Polling rate: 1000 Hz. Polling rate is how often your mouse reports its position to the computer, measured in reports per second.

At 125 Hz the mouse reports every 8 milliseconds. Blur Busters' testing puts that at "0 to 8 ms of mouse lag added to every frame", depending on when the frame starts. At 1000 Hz that interval is 1 millisecond.⁹

It matters more as frame rate rises. At 120 fps the gap between frames is 8.3 ms, close to a 125 Hz mouse's reporting interval.⁹

Set 1000 Hz in your mouse software if it is not already there.

Mouse acceleration: off to start. Acceleration changes how far the cursor or camera moves based on how fast you physically move the mouse. Off is a sensible default while you learn, so one hand movement always means one turn.

Some players choose acceleration on purpose later, and Raw Accel is the tool for that. Check both your game's settings and your mouse software for an acceleration toggle.

Windows "Enhance pointer precision": off. This is Windows' own built-in pointer acceleration. It is under Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Mouse > Additional mouse settings > Pointer Options, or Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options on older builds.¹⁰

Most competitive games apply raw input and bypass this setting. Leaving it on still affects desktop use and any game without raw input, so turning it off is the safer default.

Do this next. Before your next session, check all three settings above, in your game and in Windows.

Related¶

• Sensitivity: choosing and converting the sensitivity your setup runs.
• Health and Rest: posture and recovery over long sessions.
• Tension Management

Resources¶

• KovaaK's: where to put a consistent sensitivity and settings to work once your gear and Windows settings are ready.
• Guides: guides on gear, grips and settings.

References¶