osu! Lowest Input Lag Settings (Stable and Lazer)

The lowest input lag in osu!(stable) comes from four settings: the Optimal frame limiter (8× your refresh rate, capped at 960 FPS), fullscreen mode, raw input for mice, and a Universal offset calibrated with the Offset wizard. On osu!(lazer), keep the frame limiter off “Basically Unlimited” unless you’ve tested it, and use multi-threaded mode. Uncapped FPS is not the fix: the osu! wiki says Optimal’s latency difference from Unlimited is imperceivable, while Unlimited can stutter.

osu!(stable) settings for the lowest input lag

Open Options and set:

Setting	Value	Why
Frame limiter	Optimal	8× refresh rate, capped at 960 FPS — imperceivable latency vs Unlimited, without the stutter
Fullscreen mode	On	osu! warns that running without fullscreen increases input latency
Compatibility mode	Off	It switches to the old renderer meant for older computers
Raw input (mouse)	On	Reads the mouse directly, with no Windows acceleration
Map absolute raw input to osu! window	Your choice (tablet)	Confines a pen tablet’s area to the game window
Detect performance issues	On	Warns you when another program may hurt the client’s performance
Universal offset	Calibrated	Set with the Offset wizard, after everything above

Frame limiter: why Optimal beats Unlimited

The osu!(stable) frame limiter has four options:

Option	What it does
VSync	Limits the game to your monitor’s refresh rate — the most latency
Power Saving	Limits the game to twice your refresh rate
Optimal	Limits the game to eight times your refresh rate, capped at 960 FPS
Unlimited (gameplay)	Removes the cap while you play a beatmap

Outside of gameplay the client is limited anyway (twice the refresh rate or 240 FPS, whichever is higher). The osu! wiki states that Unlimited (gameplay) can lead to stutters and that Optimal offers imperceivable changes in input-to-output latency compared with it. A stutter costs you a note; a fraction of a millisecond doesn’t. Use Optimal.

Fullscreen, not windowed or borderless

osu!(stable) shows a direct warning when fullscreen is off: running without fullscreen mode will increase your input latency. Windowed and borderless modes hand every frame to the Windows desktop compositor first. The general trade-offs are in fullscreen vs borderless vs windowed.

Raw input and mouse settings

Raw input reads mouse or tablet position directly from the hardware, skipping Windows’ pointer processing. For mouse players, also turn off Windows mouse acceleration so your desktop and in-game feel match, and run the mouse at 1000 Hz or higher if it supports it — see mouse polling rate explained.

osu!(lazer) settings for the lowest input lag

Lazer is built differently, and its developers have written up why uncapped frame rates are the wrong goal:

• Frame limiter: the old “Unlimited” option was renamed Basically Unlimited and now caps both draw and update at 1,000 Hz. The developers’ point: lazer harvests input at 1,000 Hz and input devices poll at 125–1,000 Hz, so rendering at or beyond that has negligible benefit while adding garbage-collection overhead, GPU pipeline blocking and heat.
• Threading mode: use multi-threaded. Lazer processes input on its own thread, and multi-threaded mode stops a GPU bottleneck from dragging down the update and input rates.
• Display mode: pick Fullscreen over windowed or borderless, for the same compositor reason as stable.
• Find your own threshold: lazer (2022.611.0 and later) includes a latency certifier, a blind test that shows which frame rate you can actually tell apart. Set the limiter to the lowest rate you can’t distinguish from higher ones — anything above it is heat, not accuracy.

Stable vs lazer at a glance

	osu!(stable)	osu!(lazer)
Best frame limiter	Optimal (8× refresh, max 960 FPS)	Lowest rate you pass in the latency certifier; Basically Unlimited caps at 1,000 Hz
Input sampling	—	Separate input thread, harvested at 1,000 Hz
Key extra setting	Raw input on, Compatibility mode off	Multi-threaded threading mode
Display mode	Fullscreen (the client warns about latency otherwise)	Fullscreen

Calibrate your offset last

Every change above alters your system’s input-to-output latency, so calibrate the Universal offset after them, not before. In Options → Audio, run the Offset wizard. The Universal offset applies to every beatmap, on top of each map’s local offset.

Re-run it when you change headphones, audio output device or monitor. If hits feel consistently early or late on every map, the Universal offset is the fix — not individual map offsets.

Windows-side checks

osu! is light on the GPU but sensitive to frame-time consistency, so the usual system latency work applies:

1. Set a high-performance power plan so the CPU doesn’t downclock between notes.
2. Close overlays, browser tabs with video and capture tools while playing ranked maps.
3. Leave Windows Game Mode on unless you see a problem — it’s harmless for most games.
4. On NVIDIA, the driver’s Low Latency Mode only matters when the GPU is the bottleneck, which in osu! it rarely is.

For the full system-level checklist — including Windows timer resolution — see The Ultimate Guide to Timer Resolution for Gaming and How to Minimize Input Delay for Competitive Gaming.

Related guides

• How to Cap Your FPS Correctly
• Mouse Polling Rate Explained
• Fullscreen vs Borderless vs Windowed for Gaming
• Minecraft Lowest Input Lag Settings

The best osu! latency setup is simple: Optimal limiter, fullscreen, raw input and a freshly calibrated offset on stable; on lazer, multi-threaded mode and a frame limit set by the latency certifier rather than “as high as possible.”