5 Ways to Improve Your Skill at Gaming

If your using a bog standard mouse, then its quite likely you’ll be getting what they call ‘Negative Acceleration’, this is when the mouse in unable to move as fast as your hand is telling it to, this will result in the mouse hitting an invisible wall on your screen for a moment, if you want rid of this, get a better mouse!

Furthermore, a better mouse will allow a great frequency/speed of data to be transferred, so that your reactions will essentially be quicker, this is very important particularly If you play an FPS game.

The other setting on a mouse is called DPI, a high DPI will allow you to move your mouse very quickly, whereas a low DPI will allow you to only move it slowly. A standard mouse is likely to be 400 DPI or lower, whereas an actually gaming mouse is likely to be 2000-4000dpi.

Frequency is measured in Hz, you can either have 125hz – 250hz – 500hz or 1000hz, in other words, this is the response time of the mouse, it can either be 8ms (Milliseconds), 4 Milliseconds, 2ms and 1ms. The difference that you feel from 1ms to 2ms (1000hz to 500hz), will be minimal, but the difference you will see from 8ms delay to 1ms delay is significant enough to see roughly a 10% skill increase.

The default in Windows XP is 125hz, which is a 8ms delay time, most people will be playing with this without even realizing.

Once again the response time is measured in hertz (hz). Monitors tend to be around 60hz as standard and this would be find for somebody who doesn’t game, however this is one of the biggest performance increases I have seen in players over the years, the best you can currently get is a 120hz monitor and only an elite few currently have it, if you can afford it then great, otherwise a monitor which is capable of 75 or 85hz will see give a significant enough better gaming experience.
like the mouses, monitor also come with another specification; you may see numbers next to it like; 25ms, 8ms, 5ms, 2ms etc, this is the delay time from what is happening and when you actually see it on the monitor, once again this is very important if you play FPS. A 25ms response time is very slow, yet I still see some people game with this and they could enjoy a big skill increase by upgrading, anything below 5ms is fine for gaming and 2ms is ideal for TFT and LCD screens. The old fashioned CRT monitors (With the big back ends), used to be perfect for responses time and often would have 0ms delay, so in a sense we have taken a step backwards but some think it is worth it for the improved colors of the new monitors. Buying a CRT monitor for the 0ms response time and 120hz at a much more affordable option is a great idea for anybody who doesn’t mind the extra space, if you take your gaming seriously, this could be an option for you.

you may either want to do this to allow it to run smoother or just to remove visual distractions from the game.
- Turn texture details down low
- Change your FOV (Field of View), this gives the illusion of either being zoomed in or zoomed out.
- LODBias – This is where the pc only shows the textures in your line of vision in high detail, its like a prioritizing system.
- Tweak Brightness, contrast and gamma settings so that you are able to see everything perfectly.
- Put a limit on the FPS (Frame Per Second), if your FPS is unstable then you will experience a glitchy feeling, by putting the FPS at a fixed rate, it should feel smoother and more stable.

In windows open up task manager and close any unneccasary programs, you can strip XP back to around 25 running tasks, which are essential, anything extra is probably dead weight that is only slowing your game down.
It may be worth checking what programs and services you have starting at boot up. You can do this by typing ‘msconfig’ into run in the start menu, you can then untick boxes such as msn, spotify etc and stop them opening automatically when you start the PC.
If you want to get really clever, then you can create something called a .BAT file, which is an executable which will execute several commands at just one click of a button, in this case you would see the commands to be the closing of a particular program.