How to Reduce Input Lag in Windows — Complete Guide for Gamers

You click. Your character reacts a few milliseconds later. In competitive gaming, that delay can affect how responsive the game feels. Input lag comes from multiple sources — your mouse, Windows processing, GPU rendering pipeline, and display. This guide targets every layer.

Here are 10 settings and checks to investigate input lag in Windows. Test applicable changes individually; they may help, have no effect or make the result worse.

1. Disable Mouse Acceleration

Mouse acceleration (called "Enhance pointer precision" in Windows) changes your cursor speed based on how fast you move the mouse. Acceleration changes the relationship between hand movement and cursor movement. Whether it affects aiming depends on the game's input handling and your preference.

2. Fix USB Power Management

Windows can put USB devices into power-saving mode, causing your mouse or keyboard to momentarily "wake up" when you use them. Waking a suspended device may introduce delay; investigate this if it matches your symptoms.

Also disable USB selective suspend:
Power Options → Change plan settings → Change advanced power settings
→ USB settings → USB selective suspend → Disabled

3. Test Timer Resolution

Impact: DEPENDS ON THE GAME. Timer resolution changes how precisely timed waits wake up; whether that affects input or frames depends on how each game uses timers, and it can also make things worse. Measure before and after. DRX does not force 0.5ms.

Registry: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\kernel
Set GlobalTimerResolutionRequests = 1

On Windows 11, this value makes a timer request from one program (for example a timer tool) apply system-wide again. Test the same scenario before and after, and remove the value if nothing improves.

4. Disable V-Sync

V-Sync synchronizes your frame output to your monitor's refresh rate. It removes screen tearing but can add one or more frames of input lag. That is why competitive players usually turn it off.

5. Use Fullscreen Exclusive Mode

Depending on how the game presents frames, borderless windowed mode may go through the Windows compositor (DWM), which can add latency; modern games often use a path that avoids it. Compare fullscreen and borderless in your game.

6. Enable NVIDIA Reflex / Low Latency Mode

NVIDIA Reflex reduces the render queue, ensuring frames are submitted to the GPU just-in-time instead of being queued up. This can cut input lag in supported games.

7. Maximize Mouse Polling Rate

Polling rate determines how often your mouse reports its position to Windows. The nominal reporting intervals are 8 ms at 125 Hz, 2 ms at 500 Hz and 1 ms at 1000 Hz; these are not total input-latency measurements. A higher polling rate shortens the time between updates.

8. Set Ultimate Performance Power Plan

The Balanced power plan can throttle CPU clock speeds, which can add processing latency. Ultimate Performance prioritizes performance in the power policy (clocks still depend on temperature and power limits).

powercfg -duplicatescheme e9a42b02-d5df-448d-aa00-03f14749eb61

Then select "Ultimate Performance" in Control Panel → Power Options.

9. Compare presentation modes and visual effects

DWM adds a compositing layer to render your desktop. The presentation path depends on the game and Windows settings. Compare fullscreen and borderless modes on your system. Disabling active visual effects may change DWM workload; measure whether that affects latency or frame times in your game.

10. Optimize Monitor Response Time

Your monitor's overdrive/response time setting controls how fast pixels change color. Set it to the fastest mode that doesn't cause visible overshoot (inverse ghosting).