Mouse polling rate test
Polling rate is how often the mouse tells the computer where it is. A 125 Hz mouse reports every eight milliseconds, a 1000 Hz one every millisecond. This measures what is actually arriving, with the caveat that browsers put a ceiling on what they will report.
Move the mouse continuously across the pad for five seconds. Keep moving the whole time.
- Report rate—
- Movement reports0
Browsers cap how often they report movement, so the number is a floor rather than a ceiling: a 1000 Hz mouse can read lower here and still be fine.
How to run it
Move the pointer continuously across the pad for about five seconds. Keep moving the whole time — the measurement is taken from a rolling one-second window, and it needs movement to have anything to count.
Move at a normal speed rather than as fast as possible. Very fast movement can produce fewer, larger jumps rather than more reports.
Reading the result
| Reading | Usually means |
|---|---|
| Around 125 Hz | Default for office mice and many wireless ones |
| 200–500 Hz | A mouse configured above default |
| Above 500 Hz | A gaming mouse at a high setting |
The movement reports figure is how many samples went into the current window, which is a rough confidence indicator: a reading taken from twenty samples is less trustworthy than one taken from three hundred.
The honest limitation
A browser cannot see the USB traffic. It sees the events it chose to deliver to the page, plus the ones it buffered in between. That recovers a good deal, but it means the number here is a lower bound rather than a measurement of the device.
If you need the true rate, the manufacturer software reports what the mouse is set to, and dedicated desktop tools read it more directly. What this page is good for is the question most people arrive with — whether a mouse is running at the low default or has been set higher — and it answers that clearly.
Common questions
Why is my 1000 Hz mouse reading lower?
Because the browser is between you and the mouse. Pages are told about pointer movement on a schedule tied to rendering rather than to the mouse, so the raw rate is not directly observable. This test uses the coalesced events the browser buffers between frames, which recovers most of the difference but not all of it. Treat the number as a floor: a mouse reading 500 here may well be sending 1000.
So what is the test good for?
Telling apart the broad categories, which is what people actually want. A mouse reporting around 125 and a mouse reporting many hundreds are visibly different here, and that difference is real. It will not resolve 500 against 1000.
Does a higher polling rate matter?
Less than marketing suggests, and it stops mattering quickly. Going from 125 Hz to 500 Hz removes about six milliseconds of worst-case delay, which is perceptible to some people in fast games. Going from 500 to 1000 removes one more millisecond, which is below what almost anyone can detect. Above that it is measurable rather than noticeable.
My numbers jump around.
Expected. The measurement depends on how the browser batches events, which varies with what else the page and the machine are doing. Move the mouse continuously and steadily for a few seconds and watch where the number settles rather than reading a single instant.
How do I change my polling rate?
In the mouse manufacturer software, where it is usually a choice between 125, 250, 500 and 1000 Hz. Some gaming mice have a physical switch underneath. Wireless mice often default lower to save battery, so a wireless mouse reading low may be doing exactly what it was configured to do.