How to find your deadzones
- Put the controller on a table and click Measure resting noise. The drift test runs for three seconds and records every resting reading: the red dots on each plot. The recommended inner deadzone is the largest distance from centre among them, plus a 2% margin, rounded up (at least 3%).
- Click Measure outer edge and roll each stick slowly round its rim two or three times, then let go. The outline shows the edge each stick reached. The recommended outer deadzone makes full output arrive 2% before the weakest direction’s limit, so the stick reaches top speed in every direction.
- Move the sticks. The hollow circle is the raw stick position; the filled dot is what a game using those deadzones would receive, and the readout gives both as a percentage. Drag the sliders to try other values.
The preview uses a scaled radial deadzone: nothing inside the inner ring, full tilt beyond the outer ring, and the travel in between stretched over the full range so no precision is thrown away. Josh Sutphin’s Doing Thumbstick Dead Zones Right explains why this beats a simple per-axis cut-off, which snaps diagonal movement towards the axes.
Entering the values in a game
Games name these settings differently, and what one slider does varies, so treat the numbers as a starting point:
- Inner deadzone is usually called deadzone, stick deadzone or inner deadzone. If your game only has one slider, this is it.
- Outer deadzone is called outer deadzone or maximum input threshold. Some games express it as the edge band to ignore (our outer value), others as the point of full output (our “full output at”).
- Some sliders use a 0–100 scale, others 0–1 or 0–30. Convert the percentage, then check in game that the character stays still at rest and runs at full speed when you push to the edge.
Steam Input lets you set inner and outer deadzones for any controller in the joystick settings of a game’s controller layout, which is useful for games without their own.
For reference, Microsoft’s XInput guide suggests about 24% for the left stick and 26.5% for the right as a safe default for any controller, and notes that the right value varies from unit to unit. Measured values are usually far smaller, which is why measuring your own controller pays off.
If the inner recommendation climbs above about 10%, the stick is wearing out: see the stick drift test for fixes.