DPI first, sensitivity second
Your mouse reports motion as counts per inch, and DPI decides how many counts your hand produces. Sensitivity then decides what those counts mean to the stick. Set DPI once, at the start: 800–1600 DPI covers almost every player. The honest truth about DPI and an emulator: the engine converts counts into deflection, so after tuning, 800 and 1600 can produce near-identical stick behavior — the real difference is resolution. Higher DPI gives your smallest corrections more counts to work with; lower DPI produces fewer sensor events to smooth. Pick one and stop thinking about it.
One Windows setting matters more than any forum thread: pointer speed in the middle (6/11) position and Enhance pointer precision off. OS acceleration would sit between your hand and the emulator, making every tuned number mean something different depending on how fast you move.
The two-stage system: hip and ADS
Inputize exposes two independent sensitivity multipliers: hip (your normal movement) and ADS (while aiming). Both span 0.01–5.00 and ship at 1.00. They scale how fast mouse motion drives the stick — and every curve, smoothing preset and SAB ramp is applied after them, so the shaping you see in the preview graph is exactly what your sensitivity feeds into.
The practical consequence: you never touch the game's own sliders. In-game controller sensitivity stays at maximum for the reasons explained here, and all real tuning lives in these two sliders. ADS lower than hip is the classic controller-style setup — slower fine aim while scoped, full speed while running. A 2:1 ratio is a common starting point.
How to find your number: the 360 method
Borrowed from controller players, and it converges in minutes:
- Pick a landmark in a training range and set both sliders to 1.00.
- Place your crosshair at the landmark, turn 360° with one comfortable sweep, and note where you end up.
- Overshot the 360° — lower hip by 0.1. Undershot — raise by 0.1. Repeat until one full sweep lands roughly one full turn.
- Set ADS to about half of hip, then confirm you can track a distant head without over-correcting.
- Live with it for a full session before adjusting again — the first hour of any new sensitivity always feels wrong, and tuning inside that hour is how people oscillate forever.
Smoothing changes what the same number feels like
The identical sensitivity feels different under each smoothing preset, because smoothing reshapes velocity before it reaches the curve. Inputize ships six presets, and their descriptions are not marketing: Off (raw speeds, no filter at all), Competitive (minimal memory — the filter opens up on flicks), Precision (strong low-speed memory for fine aim), Balanced (the universal default), Smooth (classic jitter removal), Synchro (the most stable classic filter). If a sensitivity that felt right yesterday suddenly floats, check which preset is active before touching the sliders — preset switches are the usual culprit.
Change one thing at a time
DPI, hip, ADS, curve, smoothing and SAB each shift the feel, and changing three at once teaches you nothing. The ladder that converges: Windows and DPI first (set once and forgotten), hip via the 360 method, then ADS, then the curve, then smoothing — one variable per session. The response preview graph shows the actual input→output mapping while you drag, so you can see every change before you queue into a match. And if tracking suddenly feels angular in diagonals, that is not sensitivity — read the deadzone and circularity guide before re-tuning a number that was never wrong.