Workaround for Windows 8/8.1 125 Hz Polling Rate Limitation

In terms of gaming specially in FPS (First-Person Shooter) or TPS (Third-Person Shooter), polling rate plays an important role in precision. That’s why hardcore gamers invest in gaming mouse that can perform a 1000 Hz polling rate or 1000 reports per second. Sadly enough, everything works fine as expected when using Linux, OS X, and Windows 7 operating systems but most of gamers don’t know that the mouse polling rate on Windows 8 and 8.1 seems to be configured to limit any mouse to 125 Hz.

It took me quite some time to figure this one out since I haven’t had any issues at all until I played one of my TPS games. I noticed that I missed about 50% of the moving targets when sniping but should have hit them 100%. I felt something was wrong and tried to troubleshoot different kinds of causes until I checked the polling rate of my mouse. I also tried to search for the issue on Google and found out that it’s happening on all Windows 8/8.1 OS.

I already posted a fix for that issue that you can find here. However, I found at that the fix aren’t working for some and affecting some games that aren’t in the main stream of games. So to say, I’ll be posting a workaround so that your gaming mouse can perform its settings.

There’s about two ways you can do this. First is for games only and the second is for the whole OS itself.

How to do the workaround?

Games Specific

1. Press Windows Key + X then click run, type regedit.exe and then press Enter.
2. Click Yes if the User Account Control dialog box is displayed.
3. Browse to the following folder:
   • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers

   *Note If the Layers key does not exist, right-click AppCompatFlags, click New, click Key, and then type Layers to create the key.

4. Create a new registry entry for the game. To do this, right-click Layers, click New, click String Value, type the full path of the game’s executable file in the box, and then press Enter.
5. Right-click the value, and then click Modify. In the Value data field, type NoDTToDITMouseBatch, and then press Enter.
6. Click OK to confirm the change.
7. Open an elevated Command Prompt window. To do this, press Windows Key + X then click Command Prompt( Administrator).
8. Run the following command at an elevated command prompt:
   • Rundll32 apphelp.dll,ShimFlushCache

And you’re done! You can check if your mouse is performing its setting by running standalone programs that monitors the mouse polling rate. This workaround is only intended for games and it’ll not work on desktop but you can  have this workaround System-Wide.

Here’s what you need to do:

System Wide

1. From the step 4, rather than creating a new registry for the game, add C:\windows\explorer.exe instead.
2. Then follow the rest of the steps.

You can check if it’s working by running programs that monitors your mouse polling rate.