by The average PC gamer might not be too big on walking under ladders or being cursed by black cats, but we have plenty of dubious rituals and myths that have made years of message boards and Reddit threads. Established beliefs about mouse PSO, framerates, and thermal paste have been confidently forwarded for years – even when they’re wrong or irrelevant since the days of Anti-Strike 1.6.
Here are six PC gaming superstitions that I’ve seen so often over the years that I’m ready to set the record straight.
The human eye cannot distinguish between frames above 60 fps
Superstition: Busted
Fortunately, the debate about whether we can see the difference between 30 frames per second and 60 has been well squashed in recent years by console games that support visual / performance modes and emotions. way better to play using the latter. But the occasional misguided internet commenter will still insist that our eye and brain’s ability to process motion starts at around 60 fps, which is just all kinds of wrong. Part of what makes this confusing is that our eyes don’t work in “frames per second,” but the important thing is that our eyes are pretty good at detecting motion. Years ago we spoke to a visual psychologist and professor of brain science to explore this topic in depth.
I suspect that as 360Hz monitors become more common, we’ll start seeing more research digging into how we perceive motion at higher frames. BlurBusters thinks we’ll see benefits up to 1,000Hz and beyond.
Low PSO mouse settings like 400 – 800 are “better” for first person shooters
Superstition: Bus twice
There are two pieces of advice here that often conflict. One is that you will perform better in a game at a lower mouse sensitivity level or DPI setting, which requires you to make wider physical movements with your mouse to move your crosshair further on the screen. The second is that your mouse will be more accurate at low PSO like 400 or 800 pso. I’m going to say these both wrong in 2024.
First, anyone who tells you there is a “best” DPI setting is full of it. The right choice of mouse sensitivity is completely personal and influenced by the size and resolution of your monitor. If you set your mouse to 1600 DPI, it will traverse the length of a 20-inch 1080p monitor much, much faster than a 30-inch 4K monitor, for example – no message board declaration of the best DPI for a game. taking into account the details of your computer. This is also completely dependent on how you like to play games. It’s okay to choose small mouse movements at higher sensitivity over large ones at lower sensitivity if that works for you. If you struggle with your accuracy and find that your crosshair movements are too erratic, try lowering the in-game mouse sensitivity. If you can’t turn around fast enough to catch someone coming up behind you, maybe hit them a little. Find your sweet spot.
But what DPI setting should you actually be using with your mouse? There is no universal answer. As I explained years ago when debunking gaming mouse myths, a mouse sensor can perform slightly differently at different DPI settings, and back in the 2010s when gaming gear companies were racing to meet higher and higher DPI demands on their mice, they were doing it normally. by subdividing pixels on the same old sensors. A sensor that was originally only rated for, say, 4000 pso suddenly advertised as supporting 16,000 pso will be working with much “noisier” data, because the sensor resolution hasn’t changed – the only thing that has changed or how the images taken by the sensor to detect movement are split up and processed.
Over the past decade, however, gaming mice from quality brands have moved on to a new generation of sensors that support much higher resolutions. If you are using an old mouse or a real cheapo, your mouse could be unlimited more accurate at a lower PSO setting. But if it wasn’t made before 2010, I wouldn’t worry about lowering it below 800 pso. And if your mouse was made any time in the last 10 years, your PSO will be up in the thousands fine Don’t sweat it. It may not set all the way to the maximum, either.
You need to reset your modem and then your router, in that order
Superstition: Mostly busted
A thousand websites fighting for the SEO title “how to reset the internet” will give you the same basic advice: if something is disconnected with your home network, unplug your modem and router, wait 30 seconds, and then plug them both back in –starting with the modem first. There is rarely an explanation of why you need to plug the modem back in first, or what happens if you do this process in the “wrong” order. I’ve reset my network with a reckless-abandon-first router more than once without issue, but I also see the underlying logic of plugging in the modem first, so it can establish a connection to your ISP before the router does try to pick up on that connection. But does it really matter?
To find an answer, I turned to the networking server Brad & Will Made a Tech Pod Discord channel, where I knew some real network pros would like to hang out. Member Cakebatyr, a software developer with CCNA certification from Cisco, successfully completed the challenge. After repeating the question Cakebatyr came up with a very popular answer: “It depends ™️.”
What does it feel? Well, here’s a fairly obvious factor: how long it takes for your devices to boot up. “My router takes about 3 minutes to boot, my cable modem takes less than that,” Cakebatyr said.
“Two things are happening here:
“For me it comes down to the part that takes longer to set up, and my gut feeling is that the modem would take longer to establish a connection to the ISP than a DHCP request from the router to the ISP.”
If your router finished ready before your modem, it will most likely check again for a restored internet connection after a minute. So the wrong order could cost you a full minute or two of extra downtime.
To take things a step further, Cakebatyr asked three friends who work at Internet Service Providers and received no comment, confirmation of our answer here: “The order does not really matter / device startup times, ” and this XKCD comic.
I’m sure – for peak efficiency, power cycle whatever device takes longer to reboot first.
Motion blur is always bad
Superstition: Reluctantly busted
Look, I know you’ve just read the words “Offer freeze” and had to fight back the urge to throw up. I hate it when my entire screen is constantly smeared every time I move the camera, and I’d bet that motion blur is the most frequently disabled setting in all of PC gaming. But I will begrudgingly admit that not all motion blur is so bad. Motion blur against well-implemented content can help smooth out animations, and in some games paper over a lower frame rate can even help.
We’ve written in detail about why motion blur gamers don’t like it and also why it has a good reason to be there, and in which situations it makes sense to turn it on. In the meantime, I’ll let Digital Foundry make a case for how effective motion blur can be for 30fps games in particular.
It’s fine to unplug USB devices without safely ejecting them first
Superstition: Mostly busted
Well, shit. I’ll admit that I’ve spent most of my life gracefully ripping USB thumb drives out of my computer without first ejecting them into the Windows system tray. And usually seems fine! Once or twice I screwed up some files being a little trigger happy and removed from the drive although the data transfer was not enough completed, but usually there were no issues… that I was aware of. Jacob recently connected the dots between this careless behavior and Windows detection errors on USB drives, however. We are the problem, it turns out.
Being more cavalier with your external drive isn’t guaranteed to do any damage, but it’s a real possibility even with modern Windows and fast flash storage. But who wants to do that extra five seconds? 😒
You should not use too much thermal paste!!!
Superstition: Bust*
When I was first building PCs, the “pea-sized dot” of thermal paste was gospel. It’s not a big deal to use too much dough, as it was spread before turning on the refrigerator. Seriously? It doesn’t seem like much, but you’re better off using too much than too little.
There are a million YouTube videos on thermal paste application quantities and techniques, but Gamers Nexus’ thorough testing shows that, in general, there is a tiny difference in performance between a small dot of paste and a larger one. Even if you’re going overboard with thermal paste, causing it to come off the sides of your CPU cooler, it’s fine – with the caveat, if you’re using conductive thermal paste (such as metal liquid), you could cut out other components. the CPU. But again, that’s only if you’re going way overboard
One other exception is that if you’re using a really big CPU like AMD’s Threadripper, the usual pea-sized dot won’t cover the entire surface of the chip properly. But while building a normal personal computer? Just slop some paste on there and move on.
Half-Life 3 confirmed
Superstition: My cousin who works at Valve told me it’s true
