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When you’re playing ranked matches in Counter Strike: Global Offensive, you will probably want to have any edge you can get over the enemy team. And although skill is the main factor when it comes to CSGO, there many other factors, which you can use to your advantage in the game.
Many players are unaware, that CSGO has a whole range of options, which are hidden and generally accessible only via console commands or digging around in the game files. One of these options is direct mouse input.
In this quick guide you will learn how to modify the mouse sensitivity settings to your advantage and enable raw input for your game.
What Is Direct Mouse Input?
To fully understand how enabling direct input, also known commonly as raw input, can improve your mouse sensitivity, you have to first understand how your mouse really works in CSGO. There are many factors which influence your overall mouse sensitivity, such as mouse DPI or your computer hardware.
When you normally use your mouse, the mouse movement is first directed to the operating system processor, drivers, it gets filtered through sensitivity options, calculated to fit your resolution and only after all these processes it gets adapted to your frame rate. Although this might seem like a lot of work, all these processes allow you to get clear mouse movement within the game.
Enabling raw input allows you to circumvent all of these extra steps, with mouse commands getting translated directly to your game. All of the input from your hardware mouse gets sent directly to the game engine, which in theory can make your crosshair movement more precise.
Can I Get Banned For Enabling Raw Input?
No, having raw input enabled will not get you banned from CSGO. Although many players report that raw mouse input can greatly improve their in-game sensitivity and mouse acceleration, using raw input will not get you banned. This option does not provide you with some incredible advantage, but only allows you for a more precise crosshair movement, tied to your computer’s FPS.
You can only get VAC banned if you actually attempt to modify the game files. With raw input enabled you won’t be doing anything that could get you banned from the game.
How To Enable Raw Input?
Enabling raw input is actually very easy. All you need to do, is go to the settings in-game, find the mouse & keyboard tab and enable raw input. If you’ve done all of these steps, you should have raw input enabled the next time you start a CSGO match.
There’s also an alternative way to enable raw input by using the console commands. If you have the developer console enabled, you can press the tilde (‘~’) button to bring up the console and type in ‘m_rawinput 1′ to turn on raw input. If you want to disable it using the same method, simply type ‘m_rawinput 0′.
Does Raw Input Really Improve Mouse Sensitivity?
Although many players will claim that raw input mouse settings are clearly superior and provide them with improved mouse sensitivity in ranked matches. However, an equally large number of people will probably tell you the opposite that they prefer the default windows mouse settings in the game. Many pro players choose to play with raw input enabled, but just how does it really affect your game?
The answer is hard to provide, as the benefits of raw input might also be highly dependent on your hardware. Since raw input makes your mouse movements circumvent the drivers and go directly to the game, your mouse sensitivity might depend more on the frame rate you have in CSGO. If your GPU is on the lower end, chances are that you will play slightly worse with raw input enabled in your game.
Still, most people will agree that there is at least a marginal difference in game sensitivity when you enable raw input. After all, technically this speeds up the process of sending mouse movement inputs to CSGO, so one way or the other it speeds up your mouse. If you search for any optimal mouse settings guides on the internet though, almost all of them will have raw input enabled. Many pro players also choose to enable this setting, since there is no reason not to use any possible technical advantage you can get.
In Conclusion
It’s debatable whether raw input can actually have any significant impact on your game. Still, you should try to enable raw input and test how your game feels with this setting enabled. Chances are the tiny details were exactly what you were missing in your game settings.