eDPI is the most shared number in aim discussion. People post it, compare it to professionals, ask whether theirs is too high, and copy one from a player they admire. Almost all of that is happening across different games, and across games eDPI does not mean anything.
Not “means something slightly different”. Does not mean anything.
The arithmetic, which is short
eDPI is your mouse DPI multiplied by your in-game sensitivity. The physical thing it stands in for is how far you move the mouse to turn all the way around:
cm/360 = 2.54 × 360 / (eDPI × yaw)yaw is the game’s own constant — how many degrees the camera turns per mouse count at sensitivity
- It is not the same number in two engines. Counter-Strike 2 uses 0.022. VALORANT uses 0.07.
Rearrange for eDPI and the problem is obvious:
eDPI = 2.54 × 360 / (cm/360 × yaw)For one fixed physical distance, eDPI is inversely proportional to the game’s yaw. A yaw more than three times larger means an eDPI more than three times smaller for exactly the same hand movement.
The same hand, in both games
Take a common CS2 setup: 800 DPI at sensitivity 1. That is eDPI 800, and about 52 cm per 360°.
Now keep the hand identical — same mousepad sweep, same muscle memory — and ask what VALORANT calls it. The answer is sensitivity 0.314, which at 800 DPI is eDPI 251.
Nothing about the player changed. Not the mouse, not the DPI, not the distance their arm travels. Only the number the game prints, because the two games count in different units.
And that pair is the mild case. Across the decimal-scale shooters this site holds constants for, one identical hand movement spans roughly thirty times from the smallest eDPI to the largest. Run the instrument below on your own numbers and it will name the two games at the ends of your spread.
So what is eDPI actually good for
Two things, and they are both real:
- Comparing within one game. Two CS2 players’ eDPI figures are directly comparable, because they share a yaw. This is why eDPI caught on in Counter-Strike first.
- Keeping your own feel when you change DPI. If you halve your DPI and double your sensitivity, your eDPI is unchanged and so is your aim. That is the whole reason the number exists.
What it cannot do is travel. An eDPI from a game you do not play is a number in a unit you do not share.
Why the advice persists anyway
Because within the two biggest tactical shooters, the numbers happen to land in ranges that look comparable, and because “eDPI 800” is a much easier thing to say than “52 centimetres per 360 degrees”. The convenient number won.
There is also a real effect underneath the confusion: professionals across games do cluster around similar physical sensitivities, roughly 30 to 50 cm per 360°. That genuine pattern gets restated in eDPI, and the restatement breaks it.
What to use instead
cm/360, or inches per 360 if you prefer. It is a distance your arm actually moves, it is the same quantity in every game, and every sensitivity number in every menu can be converted into it. When someone tells you their cm/360, you can reproduce their aim on your own hardware regardless of which game either of you plays.
The sensitivity converter does that conversion with documented yaw constants for twenty-one games, and prints the constant it used so the result is not a black box. The eDPI calculator gives you eDPI where it is genuinely useful — inside one game, against that game’s professional range — and shows the cm/360 beside it.
The longer argument for the physical model, and how to validate a converted sensitivity rather than trusting it, is in the FPS sensitivity conversion guide.
The short version
eDPI is DPI times in-game sensitivity, and in-game sensitivity is measured in each game’s own units. Compare eDPI inside one game freely. Across games, convert to cm/360 first — otherwise you are comparing two numbers that were never on the same scale.
