Move your mouse in slow circles over the pad below. The page counts how many times a second your mouse reports its position and names the rate it looks like. Nothing to install, nothing leaves your device.
Move the mouse in circles here — keep going for a couple of seconds
Your browser only hands this page movement once per drawn frame, plus whatever it can bundle along with it, so the figure is capped by your screen rather than by your mouse. Chrome and Edge measure the true rate.
A browser cannot read the USB report rate directly — it can only count the reports it is given. Background load, a busy tab or a battery-saving mode all lower that count, so treat the number as a floor rather than a ceiling.
Very fast mice — 4000 and 8000 Hz — rarely show their full rate in any browser. An 8000 Hz mouse reading 1000 or 2000 Hz here usually means the page could not keep up, not that the mouse is faulty.
The pad above counts how often your mouse tells the computer where it is. Here is what that number means, what to expect from it, and how to change it.
Polling rate, also called report rate, is how many times a second your mouse sends its position to the computer, measured in hertz (Hz). At 125 Hz a report arrives every 8 milliseconds; at 1000 Hz one arrives every millisecond. It is not the same as DPI, which is how far the cursor travels per report.
Office mice almost always report 125 times a second. Gaming mice default to 500 or 1000, and recent ones offer 2000, 4000 or 8000 Hz through a dedicated receiver. The step from 125 to 1000 Hz is the one people actually feel; above that the returns shrink quickly.
More reports mean your cursor position is fresher whenever a game or the desktop reads it, so aiming feels more direct and fast movements trace a cleaner line. It does not make the sensor more accurate, and it cannot make a slow computer respond faster.
A 1000 Hz mouse feeding a 60 Hz screen still shows you sixty pictures a second. The extra reports are not wasted — games read the mouse far more often than they draw — but the visible benefit grows once the screen is fast too.
On a wireless mouse a higher report rate means more radio traffic, and runtime falls accordingly — often noticeably between 1000 Hz and 4000 Hz. Many gaming mice let you set one rate for wired use and a lower one for wireless for exactly this reason.
Use your mouse maker's software: Logitech G HUB, Razer Synapse, SteelSeries GG, Corsair iCUE and the rest all have a polling or report rate setting. Some mice have a switch underneath or a button shortcut instead. Plain office mice are fixed at 125 Hz and cannot be changed.