How to Turn Off Mouse Acceleration

Even if you own the best gaming mouse out there, mouse acceleration might make it feel like you’re using a $5 piece of junk.

If you follow competitive gaming, especially competitions in first-person shooter games, then you have probably heard of mouse acceleration. Most competitive gamers don’t use it, and some argue that it hinders you. We are going to discuss those arguments and provide you a short guide on how to turn off mouse acceleration permanently.

What Is Mouse Acceleration?

Your mouse uses sensors to translate its movement into the movements of the mouse cursor on the screen. This works most accurately with an awesome mousepad for gaming, but that’s a whole different story.

So, the basic principle sounds obvious, but let’s compare the mousepad and your 27’’ gaming monitor. The mousepad is much smaller and probably doesn’t have the same aspect ratio. Your mouse’s software decides to turn an inch of physical movement into, say, three inches of on-screen cursor movement.

When mouse acceleration is turned on, the relationship between the movement of your mouse and the movement of your cursor is not linear—it changes depending on how quickly your mouse moves.

If you want to move the cursor by a small amount, you move the mouse very slowly. If you want to move the cursor across the screen in one swipe, just move the mouse faster.

Mouse Acceleration: Gaming Impact

Mouse acceleration is very useful for average daily computer use. While you are working on your computer or browsing the internet, it enables you to reach every corner of the screen in one simple movement. Imagine if your mouse cursor moved at a 1:1 ratio. You would have to use a 27-inch mousepad, or you would need several swipes of the mouse to reach the other end of the screen. That would be seriously annoying.

Gaming is a different story. What counts in gaming is accuracy, which is especially important in first-person shooter games. Mouse acceleration does have some advantages in gaming, but it is mostly considered to be a bad thing. If this is a point of interest, you might want to take a look at the best FPS mouse out there.

The main advantage of mouse acceleration in gaming is speed. As we have mentioned before, it allows you to move the cursor across the screen in one mouse swipe. In first-person shooters, that means faster rotation of the camera, faster room sweeping, and faster covering of corners.

The greatest disadvantage of mouse acceleration is poor accuracy. It’s very hard to aim your weapon when you can’t precisely predict how far to move your mouse. The most common scenario involves overshooting your target and being dead before you’re able to correct your aim.

With mouse acceleration turns off, muscle memory can start being useful again. Muscle memory helps you repeat a specific motion accurately, efficiently and automatically after doing it many times. It is very useful in gaming as it greatly enhances your skills and reflexes. However, it can be developed only without mouse acceleration since mouse acceleration does not allow you to recreate identical movements.

How to Turn Off Mouse Acceleration

Different operating systems have different methods for turning off mouse acceleration. Luckily, all of them are simple and we’re going to do a step-by-step process for Windows 7, Windows 10, and Mac.

How to Turn Off Mouse Acceleration: Windows 10

In order to turn mouse acceleration off in Windows 10 follow these steps:

• Enter the ‘Start’ menu and open the search box
• Type ‘Mouse’ in the search box
• Click on ‘Change your mouse settings’ from the search results
• When you enter the mouse settings window, select ‘Additional mouse options’
• In the newly opened window, choose the ‘Pointer option’
• From the menu, uncheck the box ‘Enhance pointer precision’
• Click the ‘Apply’ button and then the ‘OK’ button

How to Turn Off Mouse Acceleration: Windows 7

If you have Windows 7 on your PC follow these steps:

• Enter the ‘Start’ menu
• Open the ‘Control panel’
• Type ‘Mouse’ in the search box in the top right corner
• Click on the mouse from the list of search results
• In the newly opened window, select the ‘Pointer Options’ tab
• In the pointer options window, uncheck the box ‘enhance pointer precision’
• Click the ‘Apply’ button and then the ‘OK’ button

How to Turn Off Mouse Acceleration on Mac

For Mac users, here are the steps you need to follow:

• Press Command-Space to open Spotlight
• In the search box, type ‘Terminal’
• Choose ‘Terminal’ from the list of search results
• Next, type the following command into the terminal without the quotation marks

“defaults write.GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1”

• Press ‘Enter’ and close the terminal

Final Words

As you can see, turning off mouse acceleration is very simple. It may take a little time to get used to the movement speed, but you will definitely see improvements in your accuracy and ranking. Hopefully, this will boost your skills to the point of becoming a real champion of competitive gaming. If not, at least you’ll be able to dominate your friends on a more consistent basis.

Either way, good luck and have fun.