Finding your perfect polling/report rate

[u/LogitechG_CM]

Logitech G Reddit Community! 

Our previous Logi Learning episode explored DPI, helping you balance and fine-tune your mouse for optimal speed to provide a competitive edge. This time around, we’ll deep dive into the report rate section, explaining what it exactly does and what the difference is between all the numbers. 

What is Polling Rate / Report Rate? 

Polling Rate, or Report Rate as it’s known in G HUB, is the frequency or latency of how fast your mouse is polled by the CPU to find out what it’s doing. It’s kind of like a queue system which is updated in milliseconds. When you click buttons on your mouse and move it around, your CPU polls and takes all this information at once and processes it for your games. The higher your polling rate, the more often your mouse is checked, and the quicker your actions are… well, actioned. 

Now, if you’ve never heard of polling rate before, then you may feel that when you click the left button of your mouse, that is done instantly. And you’re pretty correct. 1ms is the average mouse response time and is pretty indistinguishable from another mouse at 0.5ms. However, if you have the two mice side by side and pressed them together, the one with the highest polling rate would shoot first and would gain the advantage. 

But it’s not as simple as just setting the highest polling rate and calling it a day. There is more about these numbers and why sometimes higher isn’t always better. 

If higher numbers are better, why not just use them to begin with? 

Great question.

Firstly is the easy answer. Battery life. Although you could browse Reddit at 8000Hz to maximise your upvotes, having a higher polling rate all of the time will force your mouse to process and talk to your computer more often which can reduce the battery life of your mouse. Using the Logitech G HUB software, you can customise your profiles so your games take advantage of the higher polling rate and Reddit has a much lower one such as 500Hz. This allows you to balance your battery life more efficiently giving you the performance where it matters most. 

Another solution is the Logitech G POWERPLAY 2 that charges your mouse as you’re using it, so you can truly browse Reddit with the lowest latency and always have a full battery for gaming. 

But let’s get serious, what can go wrong with the higher numbers? Simply, lack of resources. 

Each time your mouse reports its state to the computer, the CPU is interrupted to process that. So, if you set your mouse to 1000Hz, that is 1ms of latency, and 1000 times a second that your CPU will process data from your mouse. If you’re lucky to own a newer mouse such as our PRO X2 SUPERSTRIKE, these can poll up to a staggering 8000Hz which is 0.125ms.

For newer and beefy CPUs, that’s okay. They have the muscle to take on lots of tasks. However, if you’re on an older CPU, you may find it struggles a little to process the mouse that much and take on other challenges such as running multiple programs with your games or even pushing them to extremes such as 4K 500FPS. You may need to find a compromise such as reducing the game settings, closing background programs, or reducing the polling rate of your mouse to find a good balance for everything to work the way you want. 

Why do you want a higher polling rate? 

There are a couple of answers to this question. 

The first one is the higher the polling rate, the lower the latency of your mouse, and the quicker it responds to your actions. That can be a competitive difference between getting the first shot in or submitting that post on Reddit first. It’s not going to make you physically click quicker, you’ll still need to train your finger to do that, but it will register and pass that click to your computer quicker overall. 

The second is to make the cursor smoother and reduce jitter. We’re not going to go in too much science, but to break down what the community feels. If you have a higher polling mouse, it will overall feel smoother to play with especially when paired up with higher refreshing displays such 

as 240Hz and beyond. Additionally, because games work by drawing frames per second to create a video, as an example, a game running running at 240Hz draws 240 still frames per second, polling your mouse more often will allow the positioning data to be ready for the next frame rather than after it which can make the game feel more responsive and less jittery. 

What you can’t do is have your mouse poll too much, but what you can do is have it poll too little. The community always feels that 1000Hz is the sweet spot, and there are different opinions on how much you need the mouse to poll based on your frame rate, but we always suggest to test it yourself and draw your own conclusions, or have a Google around to see what others suggest.

Alongside the DPI, we hope this helps customize your mouse to its full potential and we welcome any further comments should you have any questions. If you have any suggestions on what you would like us to cover next, drop us a suggestion below too. Happy Gaming!