Deadzone Analyzer

Quick start

1. 1
   Connect your controller. Plug it in over USB, or pair it over Bluetooth in your device settings first.
2. 2
   Press any button first. Browsers will not notice a controller until they see its first input, even from a button rather than a stick.
3. 3
   Let go of the stick completely for a few seconds. The analyzer needs a clean resting read before it can recommend a deadzone.
4. 4
   Push slowly to full extension in a few directions. This checks whether the outer edge of the stick is being reached cleanly.

Analyze your sticks

What a deadzone actually is

A deadzone is the radius around a stick's centre point that a game agrees to treat as zero input, no matter what the stick itself reports inside that radius. It exists because no analog stick sits at a mathematically perfect zero when released. There is always a small amount of mechanical and electrical noise, and on older or more worn sticks, a small constant offset that never fully returns to centre. Without a deadzone, that noise would show up in game as a faint, constant drift, a camera that creeps, or a character that walks on its own even though nothing is touching the stick.

The tradeoff is that a deadzone set too wide eats into your usable range. Anything you push within that radius is silently rounded down to nothing, which delays how quickly a small, deliberate nudge actually registers. The goal of this analyzer is to find the smallest deadzone that still fully absorbs your stick's natural resting noise, rather than guessing a safe sounding number that ends up costing you precision for no reason.

How to read your results

Resting drift

This is the distance your stick reports from true centre while completely untouched, averaged over a short window so a single noisy frame does not throw off the reading. A fresh, healthy stick typically settles under 0.01. Anything climbing toward 0.05 or beyond while at rest is worth watching, and anything past that is a strong sign of developing drift rather than ordinary sensor noise.

Recommended deadzone

Once a few seconds of steady resting data have been collected, the analyzer suggests a deadzone slightly above your measured resting drift, enough headroom to comfortably absorb noise without rounding away real, intentional input near the centre. Treat this as a sensible starting point for whichever game's settings menu you are tuning, not a fixed universal answer, since some games apply their own internal curve on top of whatever raw number you enter.

Outer reach and outer status

This tracks the farthest distance from centre your stick has reported since the last reset, shown as a percentage of full travel. A healthy stick should comfortably reach at or very near 100% when pushed firmly to its mechanical limit in any direction. If outer reach plateaus well short of that, commonly seen as a result capped somewhere around 85 to 95 percent, that points to an outer deadzone already being applied somewhere in the chain, either by the controller's own firmware or by the operating system, and is worth knowing about since it effectively shrinks your usable range from the outside in, the opposite problem from a centre deadzone that is set too wide.

The manual preview ring

Drag the slider to draw a ring at any radius you choose and compare it directly against your measured resting drift. If your stick's resting dot consistently sits outside the ring you have drawn, that deadzone value is too small for your hardware and you should expect some residual drift to leak through in game. If the ring sits comfortably outside your resting dot with room to spare, that value is safely covering your hardware's actual noise floor.

Applying what you find

Most modern games expose a deadzone setting somewhere in their control or accessibility menu, sometimes as a single combined value and sometimes split separately for movement and look or aim sticks. Once you have a recommended value from this analyzer, enter it there directly. If a game only offers a small number of presets rather than a precise numeric field, choose the preset that sits closest above your measured resting drift rather than the smallest available option, since rounding down into your own noise floor will simply reintroduce the drift you are trying to eliminate.

It is worth rechecking this analysis after any hardware change, a stick replacement, a repair, a firmware update, or simply after several months of regular use, since the resting drift on a mechanical stick tends to drift further from zero over time rather than staying constant.

Connecting by device

Windows and Mac

Plug in over USB, or pair over Bluetooth in your system settings first. Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all support the controller out of the box once it is paired.

Android phone and tablet

Pair the controller in your device's Bluetooth settings, then open this page in Chrome. Other Android browsers vary in their support.

iPhone and iPad

Pair an MFi or Bluetooth controller in Settings, then open this page in Safari. iOS has supported the same Gamepad API since version 14.5.

Linux

Plug in over USB or pair over Bluetooth, then use Chrome or Firefox. Some distributions need a one time udev rule for certain Bluetooth controllers to be recognised by the operating system at all. If the controller is not visible at the system level, it will not be visible here either.

Troubleshooting

The recommended value keeps changing every time I check

Let the stick sit completely untouched for a full five to ten seconds before reading the recommendation. Brief contact, even resting a finger lightly on top of the stick without pressing it, can introduce enough movement to shift the reading. Reset the measurement and try again without touching it at all.

Outer reach never gets close to 100%

Push firmly into each direction and hold briefly at the limit rather than a quick flick through it, since a fast pass through the outer edge can be missed by a single frame of reading. If it still plateaus well under 100% after several deliberate full pushes, that is a genuine outer deadzone being applied upstream rather than a measurement issue.

Resting drift is high right after I touch the stick

Some sticks take a brief moment to settle back to centre after being released, particularly if they were just pushed hard to one side. Wait a second or two after letting go before trusting the reading.

Nothing happens when I connect a controller

Press a button first. Many browsers will not register a controller until they see its first input, and moving a stick alone is sometimes not enough to trigger that first detection.