It's time to ditch the cable. If you're looking to improve your gaming setup, the mouse is one of the best places to start. Arguably one of the biggest debates is wired versus wireless, but does it really make a difference? There used to be a stark disparity between wireless and wired mice, particularly when it came to latency, but the gap between the two has become much less drastic in recent years. In our picks for the best gaming mouse in 2026, most of our choices are wireless.

Two of the biggest factors to look at in a gaming mouse are input latency and polling rate. Polling rates are measured in Hz — your average office mouse may operate at 125Hz, communicating every 8 milliseconds; a high-end gaming mouse can often reach 8,000Hz, communicating every 0.125 milliseconds.

In a 2025 survey of 2,420 e-sports players by Pro Settings, all of the top ten mouse picks were wireless. Many of the best wireless mice now use 2.4GHz dongle connections, which allow for much faster polling and latency than Bluetooth. This means that wireless mice are capable of generally reducing latency to between 0.5 and 1 milliseconds (sometimes lower), compared to wired mice at 0.3 to 1 milliseconds — a very negligible difference even to the most hardcore gamer.

The two main drawbacks of high-end wireless mice have nothing to do with performance: price and battery.