Presumably the 3200 Hz is needed for a combination of reasons:
- Under ideal conditions, if you want less than 10% variation in the number of samples per frame at 240Hz, you may need ~2400Hz. This effect is visible even by human eyeballs — you can see multiple cursor images across your field of view, and uneven spacing is noticeable.
- The mouse itself may work less well at a lower sampling rate.
- The OS and input stack may be poorly designed and work better at higher rates.
In any case, the application and cursor implementation are unlikely to ask for a mouse location more than once per frame, so the user is not really using 3200 updates per second, but that’s irrelevant.