I know its enabled by default. This question is mainly for people who prefer to keep it enabled.
When I was playing with chatgpt he told me this:
When you use mouse acceleration, you have to move your mouse more quickly to cover the same distance on the screen. This can put more strain on your tendons and muscles. Additionally, mouse acceleration can make it difficult to develop muscle memory, which can also increase your risk of RSI.
From what is says it can be harmful.
I know chatgpt is sometimes wrong, but found only one source (Dr. Levi Harrison) that agrees and nothing more.
People who blindly believe what an AI says, why?
Well ChatGPT is wrong. You’d have to look at a particular acceleration curve to determine whether it can be slower or faster. For example if the curve was x^2 (where x is the raw speed) then it would always be faster with acceleration.
Acceleration is very useful on small trackpads because you can move the mouse across the whole screen with one swipe but still position it accurately if you move your finger slowly.
I know that ChatGPT is sometimes wrong, but it gave me a source that seemed legit.
A study by Dr. Levi Harrison, a hand surgeon who specializes in RSI, found that gamers who used high mouse sensitivity and mouse acceleration were more likely to develop RSI. He also found that gamers who used lower mouse sensitivity and no mouse acceleration were less likely to develop
Seems to be from here: https://drleviharrison.com/mouse-sensitivity-gaming-rsi/
So at the very least is a real person and appears accurate to his claims
In observing high sensitivity play, it is clear that there is more of an isolation of the hand and wrist in regards to movement. These players will flick their wrists aggressively, hence engaging the anatomical structures that are at risk for developing RSI including the carpal tunnel, the wrist, joints, tendons, etc.
Reads as though the shorter, violent action of wrist flicking is claimed to be more damaging than constant, slower movement.
Back when OSU! was the big thing for streamers, and I was mainlining adc Draven bot lane in league of legends, i bought into the hype that was disabling mouse acceleration. I thought, surely, since disabling it gives the raw values rather than accelerrated ones, that my game performance would improve and be more accurate.
I stuck with it disabled for over year, thinking that eventually i would adapt to this new method of input and even become a better gamer with more clicks going where i wanted them to.
It never got better. Hell, my performance stayed worse than before the switch to disabled accelleration. It took me a month to go back to my previous level acurrracy once i switxhed it back on, and i have never turned it off since.
What people and apparently large language models don’t understand is that mouse accelleration doesn’t make the mouse movement unpredictable. It makes it accellerate on a known curve. I grew up with mouse aceleration and by the time i learned i could change it, i was not able to master or even learn this new way of using a mouse.
For those of you who don’t want personal anecdotes, turning off mouse accelleration on a three-monitor setup means unacceptably slow traversal, or unacceptably high (skipping pixel levels of too high) speed in the fine movement level.
Because I like to be able to span my three monitors and also be able to click buttons. It hasn’t affected video games since most use raw input or have an option to
Trackballs can feel better with acceleration on.