How to test your mouse polling rate
- Close other busy tabs and programs, and plug in or fully charge a wireless mouse.
- Move your pointer into the test area and move the mouse in fast, wide circles for a few seconds.
- Read the max and the nearest standard rate. Stop, press Reset and repeat to check the result is stable.
How the test works
Every time your mouse reports new movement, the browser creates a pointer event with a precise timestamp. The test counts those events and divides by the time they cover.
- Current is the rate over the last quarter of a second.
- Average covers all the time you were moving. Pauses longer than 50 ms are left out, so stopping doesn't drag it down.
- Max is the best quarter-second window so far.
- Nearest standard rounds the max to the closest common rate: 125, 250, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000 or 8000 Hz.
Normal pointer events arrive once per screen refresh, so on a 144 Hz monitor a simple test can never read more than 144 Hz. This test avoids that limit in two ways. Where the browser supports it, it listens to pointerrawupdate, an event that fires for each report as it arrives. Otherwise it calls getCoalescedEvents(), which returns the reports the browser merged into a single event. The line under the test area says which method your browser is using. Nothing is uploaded.
Browser limits
A web page can't read your mouse directly, so results depend on the browser. Chrome, Edge and other Chromium-based browsers support pointerrawupdate on secure pages. Browsers that support neither raw updates nor coalesced events report at most one event per frame, which caps the reading at your refresh rate.
Browsers also round event timestamps for security, so readings at 4000 Hz and 8000 Hz are less precise than at 1000 Hz. If the result looks wrong, try another browser before you blame the mouse. Your mouse software shows the rate it's set to.
Polling rates and report intervals
The interval is simply 1000 divided by the rate.
| Polling rate | Time between reports |
|---|---|
| 125 Hz | 8 ms |
| 250 Hz | 4 ms |
| 500 Hz | 2 ms |
| 1,000 Hz | 1 ms |
| 2,000 Hz | 0.5 ms |
| 4,000 Hz | 0.25 ms |
| 8,000 Hz | 0.125 ms |
More mouse tests
- Mouse test: check every button and catch double clicks.
- Mouse DPI test: measure your real DPI.
- FPS test: check your monitor refresh rate.
- Sensitivity converter: match your aim between games.