About Controller Check and How the Tests Work

How the tester reads your controller

The page uses the Gamepad API, a standard built into Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. Once you press a button, the browser gives the page a snapshot of the controller many times a second: each button as pressed or not with a value from 0 to 1, and each stick as two axes from -1 to 1. Everything you see is drawn from those raw values. No driver or download is involved, and nothing is sent to a server.

How each number is worked out

• Stick drift is the largest distance from the center that each stick reports during 3 seconds with your hands off, worked out as the square root of x squared plus y squared. We call under 0.05 no drift, 0.05 to 0.10 mild drift and above 0.10 drift. Those limits are our own guidance, chosen because game deadzones commonly sit in the 5 to 15 percent range. They are not an industry standard.
• Circularity splits the stick's range into 72 slices of 5 degrees and keeps the furthest point you reach in each. The average error is the mean distance of those points from a perfect circle of radius 1, shown once you have covered 90% of the slices.
• Polling rate counts how often the controller's timestamp changes while you move a stick, over 2 seconds, read in a fast loop instead of once per screen refresh. It is the rate your browser sees, which can be lower than the rate the controller is rated for.
• Vibration asks the browser to play a one second rumble effect through the controller's motors. Whether that is possible depends on the browser and the connection.

Limits

A browser cannot see everything. It cannot drive the adaptive trigger resistance of a DualSense, read gyro or touchpad position on most setups, or change a controller's firmware. The button labels on the diagram follow the standard layout browsers use, which matches Xbox naming. If your browser does not recognise a controller's layout, the tester lists its raw buttons and axes by number instead.

Who makes this

Controller Check is built and run by 1000 Ventures, a small studio that makes free, focused browser tools. We are not affiliated with Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo or any controller maker.

How this is funded

The tester is free. The site shows no ads today. If we add ads later, they will never sit inside the tester or change what it tells you.

Contact

Questions, corrections or a controller that reads wrong: michael@1000ventures.io, or see the contact page.