Gamepad and controller tester

Connect your controller to a computer or phone and press any button on it. The test shows every button and trigger, live stick positions, stick drift at rest, circularity and rumble. It works with DualSense and DualShock, Xbox controllers, the Switch Pro Controller and generic third-party pads.

Everything runs in your browser through the Gamepad API: button presses are never uploaded or saved. Nothing to install, no sign-up.

How to read the result

• Buttons. A pressed button lights up; a tested one gets a green border. A button that never lights up isn’t making contact — dirt under it, a worn membrane or a ribbon cable. A sticky button stays lit after you let go.
• Triggers. The L2/LT and R2/RT bars show the analog value from 0 to 100%. A healthy trigger sweeps the whole range and returns to 0. If a bar never reaches 100% or rests at 3–5%, calibrate or clean the trigger.
• Drift. The average stick offset while you aren’t touching it, as a share of full travel: 0.04 means 4%. Below 0.04 is normal, 0.04–0.06 is minor drift that a default in-game dead zone hides, 0.06–0.15 shows up in games, above 0.15 it is strong. These are our guidelines based on typical in-game dead zones, not a manufacturer spec.
• Circularity. The blue outline is the stick’s maximum reach in every direction. An even circle at the edge means a healthy stick. If the outline falls short in some directions, the stick is worn or out of calibration. A square outline on some third-party pads is a firmware trait, not a fault.
• Update rate. How often the browser receives new data from the gamepad, in hertz. It is not the USB polling rate from the spec sheet: the browser caps it, so only compare values between controllers in the same browser.

What stick drift is and why it happens

Drift is when your character or camera moves on its own while you aren’t touching the stick. Most controllers use two potentiometers under each stick — variable resistors for the X and Y axes. Over time their tracks wear and dust gets in, so at rest the potentiometer no longer reads zero but a small offset. Joy-Con and DualSense are notorious for it, but any potentiometer-based controller drifts eventually.

Controllers with Hall effect or TMR sticks — magnetic sensors with no friction — are largely immune. If you are buying a new gamepad and worry about drift, look for “Hall effect” or “TMR” in the specs.

How to test a gamepad or controller, step by step

1. Connect the gamepad by cable or Bluetooth and press any button — the diagram appears.
2. Press every button, the D-pad and both triggers all the way. Every button should get a green border.
3. Put the gamepad on the table, let go of the sticks and click “Measure drift”. Don’t touch it for three seconds.
4. Rotate each stick in full circles a few times and check the outline.
5. Click “Test rumble” — both motors should kick in.

Dead zone: what it is and how to set it

The dead zone is the area around the centre where a game ignores stick input. A larger dead zone hides drift but makes fine aiming coarser. After the drift test, the tool draws an orange circle — the smallest dead zone that hides your controller’s drift. Enter that value in the game’s control settings (usually called Dead Zone). Steam lets you set a dead zone for any controller in Controller Settings.

What to do if your stick drifts

Try the free fixes first: calibrate the controller (in Windows open “Set up USB game controllers” with joy.cpl; in Steam use calibration in Controller Settings) and clean the stick — rotate it in full circles 20–30 times and blow compressed air into the gap under the cap. That helps when dust is the cause. If drift stays or grows week by week, the potentiometer is worn: a repair shop replaces the stick, and on some controllers you can swap the stick module yourself. If the gamepad is under warranty, keep a screenshot of the result for your claim.

If the gamepad isn’t detected

Browsers only reveal a controller to a website after you press a button — this protects against fingerprinting. If nothing happens after a press, reconnect the cable or Bluetooth and close apps that may grab the controller: Steam Big Picture, DS4Windows, emulators. In Firefox, DualSense and DualShock 4 may use a non-standard mapping — the test then labels buttons by number. Chrome and Edge give the most complete results. Third-party pads with an X-input/D-input switch work best in X-input mode.

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Frequently asked questions