Mouse Sensitivity: What cm/360 Actually Means

eDPI is lying to you across games

Someone says they play at 800 eDPI. That tells you nothing until you know which game.

• 800 eDPI in CS2 → 51.95 cm/360
• 800 eDPI in Valorant → 16.33 cm/360

Same number. Settings more than three times apart.

This is the single commonest sensitivity mistake, and it sends people to configs that feel wildly wrong for reasons they can't diagnose.

The one measurement that travels

cm/360 is how far your mouse physically moves across the desk to turn your character all the way around.

It works across every game because it describes a real physical distance, not a number on a slider each developer scaled however they felt like.

cm/360 = 2.54 × 360 ÷ (DPI × sensitivity × yaw)

The 2.54 is just inches to centimetres. The rest is the game.

Yaw is the bit nobody explains

Yaw is how many degrees your view turns per single mouse count, at sensitivity 1. It's the game's internal scaling constant, and it's why the sliders aren't comparable.

Game	Yaw
CS2 / CS:GO / Apex Legends (Source)	0.022
Valorant	0.07
Overwatch 2	0.0066

That table explains a lot of things at a glance:

• Valorant's numbers are small because its yaw is large — each count turns you further, so you need less sensitivity
• Overwatch 2's numbers are large because its yaw is tiny

Once you know a game's yaw, every conversion in and out of it is exact arithmetic. Not an approximation, not a feel thing.

Converting between games

new sens = old sens × old yaw ÷ new yaw

That's it. Your DPI doesn't enter into it at all, provided you're not changing it — which is why this is one multiplication rather than a formula with four terms.

Worked examples:

• CS2 1.0 → Valorant: 1.0 × 0.022 ÷ 0.07 = 0.314
• Valorant → CS2: × 3.18
• CS2 → Overwatch 2: × 3.333 — exactly, since 0.022 ÷ 0.0066 is exactly 10/3

That last one is a genuinely clean ratio, which is why Overwatch players converting to CS2 can do it in their head: divide by three and a bit.

Pick your game, set convert to for the one you're moving to, and the calculator does that multiplication for you — keeping your DPI where it is.

The number that actually decides your setup

You almost never do a full 360 in a game.

You do 180s — turning to check behind you, or to answer someone shooting you in the back. That's half your cm/360.

At CS2 800 DPI sens 1.0, a 180 is 25.98 cm. On a 45 cm mousepad you've got about 19 cm of room left. Fine.

Now drop to sens 0.5 — a genuinely common low-sens setting:

• cm/360 becomes 103.91
• a 180 becomes 51.95 cm
• on that same 45 cm pad, your headroom is −7 cm

Negative. You physically cannot turn around in one movement. You have to lift the mouse, put it back down and continue the turn — mid-turn, while being shot at.

That's not a rounding artefact. It's the tool telling you your desk is too small for your settings, and it's the most practical thing on this page.

Overwatch 2 at 800 DPI and sens 1.0 is even starker: 173.18 cm/360, an 86.59 cm flick, −41.6 cm of pad. Nobody plays like that, which is exactly why Overwatch sensitivities are quoted in whole numbers like 5 and 6.

DPI vs sensitivity: not the same thing

These get confused constantly.

• DPI is how finely the sensor measures physical movement
• Sensitivity is how much the game multiplies that measurement

You can play at 3200 DPI with a very low in-game sensitivity and turn more slowly than someone at 400 DPI. What decides your speed is the product, and then the cm/360 that product produces in your specific game.

Does it matter which one you change? Slightly, and less than the internet claims. 400 DPI at sens 2 and 800 DPI at sens 1 give an identical cm/360 and feel the same in almost every respect.

The real differences:

• Higher DPI reports position more finely
• Very low DPI can be more affected by sensor noise on some surfaces

Practical advice: pick a DPI your sensor handles well — 800 or 1600 are the usual choices — and do all your adjusting with the in-game slider. Then only one number changes when you move between games.

Mouse counts, if you want the underlying unit

The calculator also reports mouse counts per 360° — 16,364 at CS2 sens 1.0.

This is the DPI-independent version: how many raw sensor counts the game needs to spin you round. It's the number that stays fixed when you trade DPI against sensitivity, and it's a useful sanity check that you really have kept the same setting when you change both at once.

What sensitivity should you use?

There isn't a correct answer, only a correct process — which is why the tool tells you what you have rather than what you ought to have.

Broadly: tactical shooters reward slower settings that let you make small precise adjustments from the elbow and shoulder. Faster settings favour reaction and movement.

But what matters far more than the number:

Keep it consistent. Aim is a trained motor skill. Changing sensitivity resets that training, and a week of adjustment costs more than any theoretical improvement gains you.

Pick something that lets you complete a 180 on your pad. Write it down. Then leave it alone long enough to actually learn it.

Before you blame your sensitivity

• Windows pointer speed at 6/11 — the only position that doesn't scale your input
• Mouse acceleration off, in Windows and in game
• "Enhance pointer precision" unticked
• Same DPI across every game, so only the sensitivity differs
• Scoped/ADS sensitivity converted too, not left at whatever it defaulted to
• Settings written down before you start experimenting

Half the sensitivity problems people try to solve with maths turn out to be pointer precision quietly left on.