Mouse Polling Rate Test

How to use this test

1. Move the mouse inside the box. Draw continuous circles. Steady, uninterrupted motion gives the cleanest sample — stopping and starting adds gaps that are not report intervals.
2. Keep going for five seconds or more. The estimate needs several hundred samples before it stabilises. The sample counter tells you when you have enough.
3. Move the pointer out of the box. Leaving the test area ends the run and produces the verdict.
4. Compare against the standard rates. Real mice run at 125, 500, 1000 Hz and similar. We show which standard rate your reading maps onto, and how far off it sits.

What is mouse polling rate?

Polling rate, also called report rate, is how many times per second your mouse tells the computer where it is. It is measured in hertz. A 1000 Hz mouse sends a position report every millisecond; a 125 Hz mouse sends one every eight milliseconds.

It is unrelated to DPI, though the two are constantly confused. DPI is sensitivity — how far the cursor travels per unit of physical movement. Polling rate is freshness — how often that movement is reported. You can have very high DPI and a very low report rate, or the reverse, and they are adjusted independently.

Higher is better up to a point, because the gap between reports is dead time during which your computer does not know the mouse has moved. But the benefit falls off sharply, and this is the part most buying advice gets wrong.

How to check your polling rate accurately

This is where almost every competing tool goes wrong, so it is worth explaining properly.

Browsers do not deliver every mouse report to JavaScript as it arrives. For performance reasons they coalesce them: all movement since the last frame is merged into a single pointermove event delivered once per frame. On a 144 Hz display that means roughly 144 events per second reach the page, regardless of whether the mouse is reporting at 500, 1000, or 8000 Hz.

Any test that counts mousemove events is therefore measuring the refresh rate of your monitor. That is why so many polling rate sites report a suspiciously round number close to your display refresh, and why they disagree with your vendor software.

The fix is PointerEvent.getCoalescedEvents(), which returns the individual un-merged samples the browser received between frames, each carrying its own high-resolution timestamp. Taking the median gap between those timestamps gives a real estimate of the report interval. The status message above the readings tells you whether your browser supports it — Chrome and Edge do, and results there are meaningfully more accurate.

What we still cannot see

Being straight about the limits matters more than claiming precision we do not have:

• Timestamp quantisation. Browsers deliberately reduce timer precision to mitigate timing side-channel attacks, which puts a floor on how finely we can resolve intervals.
• Dropped samples under load. A busy browser can discard reports before they reach the coalesced buffer, biasing the estimate downward.
• OS scheduling jitter. The gap we measure includes delay added by your operating system's input stack, not only by the mouse.
• Very high rates. Above roughly 2000 Hz the measurement noise approaches the size of the interval itself. We can tell you it is high; we cannot reliably separate 4000 from 8000.

What polling rate should I use?

Here is what each step actually buys you in worst-case delay before your movement is reported:

The pattern is the important part: every doubling halves the remaining delay, so every doubling delivers half the benefit of the last one. Going from 125 to 500 Hz removes 6 milliseconds. Going from 1000 to 8000 Hz removes less than one.

When high polling rates actively hurt

Above 1000 Hz there is a real cost. Every mouse report is a USB interrupt your CPU must service. At 8000 Hz that is eight thousand interrupts per second, each preempting whatever your processor was doing. On a CPU-limited system — which describes most gaming systems at competitive settings — this measurably reduces frame rate, and reports of 5 to 10% loss are common.

You would be trading roughly 0.9 milliseconds of input latency for several milliseconds of additional frame time. That is a losing trade, and it gets worse the more CPU-bound you are.

How to change your mouse polling rate

1. Check your vendor software first. Logitech G Hub, Razer Synapse, Corsair iCUE and SteelSeries GG all expose it, usually under a performance or sensitivity section.
2. Look for a hardware switch. Some mice have a button combination or a physical switch on the underside instead of a software setting.
3. Check onboard memory. Many gaming mice store the setting on the device, so it persists without the software running. Set it once, then uninstall the software if you prefer.
4. If there is neither, it is fixed. Office mice and budget models run at whatever rate they shipped with, very often 125 Hz, and cannot be changed.

Why does my mouse feel laggy or stuttery?

Check stability before you look at the rate. This is the single most useful thing on the page, and almost nobody checks it.

Stability is how tightly your report intervals cluster around their median. A mouse reporting every 1.0 ms with almost no variance scores near 100%. One alternating between 0.5 and 3 ms scores poorly even though its average looks perfectly fine.

That matters more than the headline number, because a stable 500 Hz mouse feels better than an erratic 1000 Hz one. Inconsistent reporting is exactly what your hand perceives as stutter, weight, or aim that will not settle. If your stability is below about 55%, fix that first:

1. Plug directly into a rear motherboard port. Not a hub, not the front panel.
2. Move a wireless receiver away from USB 3 devices. They emit interference right in the 2.4 GHz band. A short USB extension bringing the receiver out front often fixes it outright.
3. Try a different cable. Fraying near the strain relief, where the cable leaves the mouse and flexes constantly, is common.
4. Close background applications. A saturated CPU delays interrupt servicing.
5. Disable USB selective suspend for that device in Device Manager on Windows.

Is wireless worse than wired?

Much less than it used to be. Modern low-latency wireless from the major manufacturers runs at 1000 Hz and adds roughly 1 millisecond over wired — well below perceptual threshold for essentially everyone.

Bluetooth is a different matter. It typically runs at 125 Hz with variable latency and is genuinely worse for gaming. If your mouse supports both, use the dedicated 2.4 GHz receiver rather than Bluetooth, and this test will show you the difference clearly.

Related tests

Polling rate is one part of how responsive a mouse feels. The click latency test measures the delay between input and screen response, and the drift test checks whether the sensor reports movement that is not happening — which shows up here as noise in the interval trace.

For the full explanation of what each rate buys you, see the guide on whether 1000 Hz is actually better than 500 Hz.

Frequently asked questions