Centimetres per 360 degrees is the distance your hand travels to turn all the way around. Every sensitivity number eventually reduces to it, which is why it is the figure worth carrying between games — and because it is a distance, the constraint on it is furniture rather than preference.
That last point is the one people skip. A sensitivity is a number in a menu and feels like a matter of taste. A turn distance is centimetres of mat, and no amount of preference makes a 50 cm sweep fit on a 30 cm surface.
Why the portable unit is a distance
In-game sensitivity numbers are not comparable across titles. Each engine decides for itself how many degrees one mouse count turns you, so 1.0 means something different everywhere and tells you nothing on its own.
What does not vary is your hand. Move the mouse 30 centimetres and you have moved it 30 centimetres in every game you own. Reducing a setting to the distance it produces is what makes it transferable, and it is why every conversion tool works by holding that distance constant.
The arithmetic
Three numbers decide it — the game’s yaw constant, your in-game sensitivity, and your mouse’s CPI:
cm/360 = (360 / (yaw × sensitivity)) / CPI × 2.54Counter-Strike at 800 CPI and 1.0 sensitivity:
- 360 ÷ (0.022 × 1.0) = 16,364 counts for a full turn
- 16,364 ÷ 800 = 20.5 inches
- 20.5 × 2.54 = 52 cm/360
Every conversion is that, run twice — once to get out of one game’s units and once to get into another’s.
The number you actually use is half of it
Nobody turns 360 degrees in one sweep. The movement that decides whether a setting works is the 180, and that is half your cm/360 in one unbroken motion without lifting:
| cm/360 | 180° flick | What it asks of you |
|---|---|---|
| 20 cm | 10 cm | Wrist only. Fast, twitchy, hard to hold steady |
| 35 cm | 17 cm | Wrist and a little forearm |
| 50 cm | 25 cm | Arm aiming. Needs a large pad and clear desk |
| 80 cm | 40 cm | Repositioning mid-turn on most desks |
A large desk mat is around 90 by 40 centimetres, and your arm does not start at the left edge of it. Past roughly 50 cm/360 you will lift and reset during ordinary turns, which is a skill rather than a fault — but it has to be a deliberate choice, not a thing you discover in a fight.
Your desk sets the ceiling
Measure the clear space to the left and right of where your hand rests. Not the mat — the space your forearm can actually sweep through without meeting a keyboard, a monitor stand or the edge of the desk.
Whatever that distance is, your 180° flick has to fit inside it with room left over. A flick that uses every available centimetre is one that fails the moment you start from slightly the wrong place, which in practice is most of the time.
Two things buy headroom cheaply. A larger mat is the obvious one. Moving the keyboard further left — or removing the number pad entirely — is the one people overlook, and it usually returns more usable width than a bigger mat does.
Your grip sets the floor
| Grip | Driven by | Comfortable range |
|---|---|---|
| Fingertip | Fingers and wrist | 20–35 cm |
| Claw | Wrist, some forearm | 25–40 cm |
| Palm | Forearm | 35–60 cm |
These are tendencies rather than rules, and the ranges overlap because people overlap. The useful part is the direction: a fingertip grip physically cannot produce a 40 cm sweep without becoming an arm movement, and an arm aimer holding 20 cm/360 will overshoot every target because the smallest movement they can make is already too large.
Pick the range your grip lands in, then move within it until something feels settled. Do not pick a number first and then fight your hand to reach it.
What that looks like per game
The same distance comes from very different-looking numbers, because each engine scales sensitivity its own way:
- Counter-Strike at 800 DPI and 1.0 → about 52 cm/360
- Valorant at 800 DPI and 0.5 → about 33 cm/360
- Overwatch at 800 DPI and 5.0 → about 35 cm/360
Counter-Strike’s low-sensitivity reputation is not a cultural quirk. Its yaw constant is 0.022 against Valorant’s 0.07, so the same-looking number produces a much longer turn.
| Game | Degrees per count at 1.0 |
|---|---|
| Counter-Strike 2 | 0.022° |
| Apex Legends | 0.022° |
| Valorant | 0.07° |
| Overwatch 2 | 0.0066° |
Overwatch’s constant is the smallest of the four, which is why its sensitivity values look so much larger for an ordinary turn distance. None of these numbers is high or low in itself. They are units, and comparing them directly is the same error as comparing a reading in inches to one in centimetres.
Low and high are trade-offs, not tiers
A shorter turn distance gives you speed and costs you precision: the same small tremor in your hand covers more pixels. A longer one gives you precision and costs you the ability to turn quickly without repositioning.
Neither is correct. What is genuinely wrong is a distance your desk cannot accommodate, because that converts every large turn into an unplanned lift — and a lift mid-fight is a movement you did not choose to make.
Finding the one you are on now
You cannot convert a setting you have not measured. Two things have to be true before the arithmetic means anything:
- Know your real CPI. Run the DPI test rather than trusting the box. Sensors miss their nominal figure routinely, and the error propagates straight into your turn distance.
- Turn pointer acceleration off first. A DPI reading taken through an acceleration curve is not a fixed ratio, so everything built on it inherits the error — see pointer acceleration breaks the measurement.
With those settled, the sensitivity converter will hold your distance constant across games, and the eDPI calculator gives you a quick way to compare two settings within a single title.
Pick once
The figure that beats every other consideration is the one you stop changing. Muscle memory is built on a constant, and a player who has held 40 cm/360 for a year will out-aim the same hand that has been adjusting for a month. Measure your DPI, convert once, and leave it.
Give any change a fortnight before judging it. A new distance feels wrong immediately and stops feeling wrong somewhere in the second week, which means every judgement made in the first few days is a judgement about unfamiliarity rather than about the setting.