Our PUBG mouse guide covers the best DPI and sensitivity settings when it comes to optimising your mouse.
Getting your mouse settings and sensitivities into a lovely, optimal state in PUBG isn’t a simple process as you have a surprising number of different sensitivities to tamper around with. The default options aren’t exactly the worst way to play the game by a long shot, but savvy players can make some very important changes here that will provide a pretty significant in-game advantage.
To help you optimise your mouse sensitivity settings, we’ve put together a step-by-step guide which will take you through the process. We’ll also explain how DPI affects your mouse control, the importance of disabling mouse acceleration, and how to find the best sensitivity settings for each viewpoint you’ll be utilising in any given match.
Much of what you’ll find in this guide will be useful in many other FPS titles, so if there’s another competitive shooter you’re big into at the moment, there’s definitely some transferable advice here.
Finally, if there’s anything else you’d like to see us include in this guide, don’t be afraid to let us know in the comments section below and we’ll work it into a future update.
Make sure you visit our core PUBG Guide hub when you’re done here. It contains all of the most important tips and tactics you need to win more games.
Navigation:
We recommend reading through the whole of this article, but if you want to jump to a specific section then you can use the following links:
1. PUBG: Mouse Acceleration – The importance of disabling this aim-wrecking feature
2. PUBG: DPI – How to find the best DPI settings for your mouse
3. PUBG: Sensitivity Settings – The best PUBG mouse sensitivity settings
4. PUBG: Other Games – Make the most of your experience in other games
PUBG: The importance of turning mouse acceleration off
One of the most important things to do when adjusting your mouse settings in PUBG is to disable mouse acceleration. Why is mouse acceleration such a problem? Well, it increases your movement sensitivity depending on how rapidly you move your mouse across your mouse pad.
In this article, we recommend basing all mouse sensitivity on the principle that you should be able to perform a clean 180-degree sweep through the environment in front of you using a complete left to right movement of your mouse across the mouse mat.
On some occasions you are going to be looking around very quickly (such as in an intense, surprise combat engagement), and sometimes you’re going to be taking a much slower appraisal of the environment (like when you’re scoping out the battlefield from a position of stealth).
In a game like PUBG though, those very different situations will often rapidly collide, and you need to be able to rely on the same degrees of movement, using the same mouse pad real estate, in order to both survive and prosper. You really don’t want your field of view to be suddenly off-kilter when you try to react to being jumped by another player.
To see whether or not you have mouse acceleration on, move your mouse slowly all the way across the width of your mouse mat, then whizz it back to its starting position. If you’ve got mouse acceleration turned on, your viewpoint will be different to the one you started off with. If it’s disabled, then you should – more or less – be right where you started.
Keeping mouse acceleration switched on will simply wreck your muscle memory over time. That special, unconscious reaction advantage only comes with practise, and it provides you with a crucial advantage on the battlefield.
Mouse acceleration is, simply put, a bad thing for gaming – Here’s how to turn it off:
- Search “Mouse” in the Windows search bar at the bottom left of your screen, and select “Change your mouse settings”.
- Under “Related Settings”, select “Additional mouse options”.
- A new window should pop up. Select “Pointer Options”, then untick the “Enhance pointer precision” box. And you’re done!
More PUBG guides
- PUBG Guide – All of our essential, in-depth PUBG guide content in one place – PUBG: Guide
- Audio Settings – How to tweak your sound settings to gain the upper hand – PUBG: Best audio sound settings
- FPS Settings – Our guide to boosting FPS and general performance in PUBG – PUBG: Best FPS settings to boost performance
- Mouse Settings – How to adjust your DPI settings for better precision play – PUBG: Best mouse DPI and sensitivity settings
- NVIDIA Settings – Our guide to making your NVIDIA-based gaming PC sing – PUBG: Best NVIDIA settings guide
PUBG: How to find the best DPI settings for your mouse
For the uninitiated, DPI stands for Dots Per Inch. This basically means that a mouse set at 1,000 DPI will move 1,000 pixels for every inch that you pass it across your mouse mat.
Mouse DPI is an often controversial subject when it comes to first-person shooters in general. Some recommend playing with an extremely high DPI, while many people prefer a lower setting somewhere in the 400-800 range. It depends very much on your own personal circumstances, your aptitude aptitude, and your physical comfort preferences.
Lower DPI settings are generally favoured by those players who make use of one of those extra large mouse mats you might have seen a lot streamers make use of. A lower setting means you have to move the mouse further to achieve the same effect as if you were making use of a higher DPI.
A big mouse mat allows for nice big arm movements, but others prefer a smaller pad with a much higher DPI. It really depends on what you find most comfortable.
If you’re more comfortable making tiny adjustments, go for a high DPI – although note that it’s generally recommended that you avoid going higher than, say, 1000 or 1200 DPI. If you like to make bigger arm gestures, go for a lower DPI.
A final note on DPI before you start messing around with the settings yourself. You’re unlikely to have access to any DPI settings whatsoever if you’re using the bog-standard mouse that was supplied by your PC manufacturer. You’ll likely need to pick up a mouse built specifically for gaming in order to tweak these kinds of settings. We have some recommendations from the leading manufacturers for you below:
PUBG: The best mouse sensitivity settings
If you open up the settings menu and then head over to Control you can see a few options to mess around with under the Mouse section.
Before we talk about actually tweaking the numbers though, here’s a quick overview of what the most important settings actually mean:
- General Sensitivity – This is your standard sensitivity for looking around the environment.
- Targeting Sensitivity – This is the setting for when you’re aiming in third person.
- Scoping Sensitivity – This is your aim-down-sights setting, with further scoping settings to tweak below this value, based on the zoom level you’re working with.
Those are the numbers that you need to tweak, then, but what values should they be set at?
As mentioned earlier on in this article, we want to be able to take in a 180-degree view of whatever’s in front of us, using one complete sweep across our mouse mat. Different viewpoints move at different rates, however, and so you’re going to have to individually tweak each settings to achieve the same effect.
To do this you’re going to need a point of reference that you can use for each tuning of the individual sensitivities that are featured.
A good way to do this is to get inside a building and look directly at a window, or another fixed object. You then want your full-width mouse-mat sweep to leave you looking directly behind that window, regardless of whether you’re using normal free look, or aiming down the sights of your juiciest sniper weapon.
It takes time to get this right, but it’s well worth the effort – even if it does leave you horribly exposed. Just remember that you’re not trying to win matches here, you’re trying to get your settings fine-tuned, and the earlier you get this process finished (before you start picking up really bad habits), the better.
PUBG: Make the most of your experience in other games
How can we make a virtue out of the muscle memory that you’ve already built up from other games? Assuming you haven’t picked up any bad habits from using mouse acceleration – for example – in the past then it’s not the craziest idea in the world to simply replicate the settings you’re used to taking advantage of in other online shooters.
It’s not always easy to achieve, but it is well worth taking the time to try and replicate the sensitivity settings you’ve grown accustomed to in one shooter, and then apply them to all other games of its type. That way you’re carrying over an innate advantage that you’ve worked hard to develop over time into your new competitive games – it’s a great way of increasing your efficiency in general.
Just make sure you’re not carrying bad habits over from one game to another. Much of the advice contained in this PUBG mouse guide can be applied to other titles, and hardcore FPS fans would do well to sharpen up their sensitivity settings, whatever game you’re playing at the time!
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