SteelSeries Engine 3 Software
The Rival 500 will work right off the bat without having to install any software, but if you want to customize anything you’ll need to download the SteelSeries Engine 3 software. This software is made to work with all current SteelSeries products including mice, keyboards, and headsets. It is great to have one unified application for all of your gaming peripherals.
When you open up the Engine 3 software it will show you which SteelSeries products you have connected to your PC. In our case it is just the Rival 500 mouse. There is a drop down where we can easily select one of our saved configurations or load the default configuration.
If we click on the Rival 500 banner it will bring up the main configuration for the Rival 500. Here we can remap all of the programmable buttons, set our two different DPI levels, acceleration / deceleration, angle swapping, polling rate, as well as set tactile cooldowns. Tactile cooldowns are great for MMO’s and MOBA games as you can set your tactile cooldown for a certain spell or ability. That way the mouse will vibrate and give you tactile feedback when your spell or ability is available to use again. Each programmable button can be set to a keyboard button, media button, macro, launch application, OS shortcuts, and more. Macros are quite easy to record and setup. The software also gives you the ability to save different configs for different games.
As I said earlier the two RGB lighting zones (scroll wheel, SteelSeries logo) and be controlled independently. The software offers different effects like color shift, breathing, trigger, and you can completely disable the lighting all together. The software also saves your last 4 lighting settings so you can easily go back to them.
Besides being able to configure the Rival 500 the Engine 3 software has some pretty cool features. First you can add games and applications to your “Library” and then set your profiles for each specific one. This means that when you have this game or application open the mouse will automatically switch to that profile. This is extremely convenient and saves us the step of switching the profile before we get in game.
Next is GameSense which allows for different illumination and tactile feedback based on in-game events. Currently it looks like it only works with Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, DOTA 2, and Minecraft. But this feature is really cool! You can have the RGB LEDs change colors when your health gets low, get tactile feedback when you are stunned or your health gets to a certain point, etc.
