Overwatch implemented a new high precision mouse input option Tuesday in Patch 1.42, but the feature is anything but self-explanatory. To help players understand it, Overwatch gameplay engineer Derek Mulder posted a breakdown on the official Blizzard forums that same day.
Overwatch ticks every 16 milliseconds, or at 62.5Hz, according to Mulder. At each tick, the game updates the player's aiming direction based on raw inputs from the mouse hardware. This is the conventional way to handle mouse input in first-person shooters, but it falls short when considering that many gaming mice support 500Hz or more in polling rates.
With the new high precision option enabled, Overwatch will read all those mouse inputs it would normally. This allows players to shoot between rendered frames, or between rendered frames that occur between ticks, allowing for more exact aiming.
Mulder also shared an example to illustrate the change. This first video is an example of a mouse flick in Overwatch. The flick is done at a constant speed by a computer, so it's not perfectly representative of how humans use mice, but it makes the comparison clearer.
Here's what that same flick looks like from above, with white lines indicate where the player's aim is pointing at each 16ms polling interval.
This next video adds in red lines to show where the player is aiming after every received mouse input at 1,000Hz.
Enabling the high precision option lets the player shoot down any of the red lines, rather than only down the white lines.
The change won't make looking around feel different, Mulder says, but it will add a small amount to the game's CPU load. The feature also won't affect primary fire for tracking weapons such as Symmetra's Photon Projector.
Players can try out the new feature in Overwatch Patch 1.42, which also introduced Baptiste and Torbjörn buffs, new competitive season dates and the Season 19 competitive map pool.
Photo courtesy of Blizzard
