Office workers-especially if they have cheap mice with no DPI buttons-may be perfectly fine with Enhance Pointer Precision and used to the acceleration that occurs. (Some gamers may like that Enhance Pointer Precision handles this automatically, though.) Especially considering many gaming mice let you adjust DPI more precisely using buttons on the mouse-so you can use low DPI when aiming and high DPI when running around. It causes problems and can slow you down when you’re trying to make fast, precise movements in multiplayer games. In particular, gamers with decent mice tend to dislike Enhance Pointer Precision (and mouse acceleration in general) for this reason.
RELATED: How to Choose the Right Gaming Mouse This is bad for building up muscle memory. With the acceleration enabled, it’s not just about distance-it also depends on how fast you move your mouse, and it’s difficult to predict what small differences in speed can do. With Enhance Pointer Precision disabled, you build up muscle memory better because you learn exactly how far you need to move your mouse to place it at a certain point on your screen. Move your mouse a tiny bit faster or a tiny bit slower and there may be a large increase or decrease in the distance your pointer moves. One problem is that the acceleration produced by Enhance Pointer Precision isn’t a perfectly linear increase, so it’s hard to predict. Whether this setting is actually helpful depends on your mouse hardware and what you’re doing. Is Enhance Pointer Precision Good, or Is It Bad?
This can also be particularly useful on laptop touchpads, allowing you to move your finger more quickly on the touchpad to move the mouse cursor a greater distance without dragging your finger all the way to the other side of the touchpad. You can also move the mouse more slowly than normal to gain better accuracy when precisely moving the mouse small distances. With Enhance Pointer Precision, you can move the mouse more quickly to move it from one side of the screen to another without moving it a greater distance. Without Enhance Pointer Precision, you may need to move the mouse a longer distance to move it from one side of the screen to another. The mouse doesn’t have a very good sensor and is limited to a fairly low DPI setting.
This feature is enabled by default in Windows because it’s useful in many situations.įor example, let’s say you’re using a PC in an office and you have a cheap $5 mouse. Why Enhance Pointer Precision Is Enabled By Default With Enhance Pointer Precision enabled, your cursor would travel a smaller distance if you moved your mouse more slowly, and a greater distance if you moved your mouse more quickly-even when moving your mouse the exact same distance. Without this feature enabled, you could move your mouse an inch and your cursor would always move the same distance on the screen, no matter how fast you moved the mouse. In other words, Enhance Pointer Precision makes the speed you move your mouse matter. When you move it slower, the DPI decreases and your cursor moves a shorter distance. With this setting enabled, Windows monitors how fast you move your mouse and essentially adjusts your DPI on the fly. When you move the mouse faster, the DPI increases and your cursor moves a longer distance. A higher DPI means your cursor moves farther when you move the mouse the same distance.Įnhance Pointer Precision is basically a type of mouse acceleration. Normally, the only thing that controls the distance your mouse cursor moves on the screen is how far you physically move your mouse. The relationship between the two is controlled by the “ dots per inch” (DPI) setting.
RELATED: Mouse DPI and Polling Rates Explained: Do They Matter for Gaming?