Mouse Acceleration Test
Compare a slow and a fast drag to see whether acceleration is on.
Slow sweep
—
Fast sweep
—
Ratio
—
Next
Slow drag
Use a ruler or two marks on your desk so both drags really do cover the same distance — the comparison is worthless otherwise. To turn acceleration off, uncheck "Enhance pointer precision" in Windows mouse settings. macOS applies a curve that cannot be fully disabled without third-party software.
Your test runs locally in your browser. No device data is uploaded.
How to use the acceleration test
Pick two marks on your desk a fixed distance apart, or lay a ruler beside the mouse. Drag from one to the other slowly and release, then do exactly the same distance quickly. The test compares how many pixels each drag covered.
The comparison is only as good as your distance matching, so repeat it a couple of times. A few percent difference is measurement error; a clear gap is acceleration.
What acceleration does
With acceleration off, a given physical movement always produces the same cursor movement. With it on, the system applies a curve so that moving faster covers proportionally more screen, letting you cross a large display with a short flick while keeping fine control when moving slowly.
That is convenient on a desktop and actively unhelpful for aiming, because the same hand movement produces different results depending on how fast you happened to make it, which is exactly what stops muscle memory forming.
Turning it off
On Windows it is the Enhance pointer precision checkbox in mouse settings. On macOS the pointer curve cannot be fully disabled through the normal settings and needs third-party software if you want a linear response.
Games frequently have their own acceleration setting independent of the system one, so check there too. And once you change it, the mouse DPI test becomes trustworthy — with acceleration on, a measured DPI figure means very little.
Frequently asked questions
- How does this detect acceleration?
- With acceleration off, the same physical movement always covers the same number of pixels whatever speed you do it at. With it on, a fast movement covers more. Dragging the same distance slowly and then quickly and comparing the two is enough to tell, without knowing anything about your hardware.
- How do I turn acceleration off?
- On Windows, uncheck Enhance pointer precision in the mouse settings. macOS applies a curve that cannot be fully disabled without third-party software. Many games also have their own acceleration setting, separate from the system one.
- Should acceleration be off?
- For aiming, usually yes: consistency between slow and fast movement is what builds muscle memory. For general desktop use it is a matter of preference, and plenty of people prefer it on for covering a large screen quickly.
- Why does my ratio not come out at exactly 1.00?
- Because you are matching the physical distance by hand. A few percent either way is measurement error rather than acceleration, which is why only a clear difference is reported as accelerated.