Analog Stick Range Test

Every game assumes your stick reaches 1.00 when you push it as far as it goes. Plenty of sticks do not. They top out at 0.91 on one side, or 0.86 going up, and nothing on screen ever tells you. You do not feel a missing input, you feel a slightly slower turn in one direction and a car that will not quite reach full lock, and you assume that is how the game plays. This test records exactly how far your stick travels in every direction, how evenly the two ends of each axis match, and how much usable movement is left once your deadzone takes its cut.

Measure Your Range

Results

Axis breakdown

What your deadzone costs you

Report

How to Run It Properly

1. Use a cable if you have one, and press any button on the pad so the browser can see it.
2. Press Start in range capture mode.
3. Push the stick fully left and hold for a second. You should feel it hit the housing. Push until it physically stops, not until it feels far enough.
4. Do the same for right, up and down. Each edge ticks green as it locks in.
5. Read the shortest reach first. If everything is above 0.97 you are done and your range is fine.
6. If something came in short, switch to slow sweep mode and push out toward that direction over about three seconds. That is the mode that tells you whether the travel is smooth or has a flat spot in it.
7. Repeat on the other stick. They wear at different rates.

If the numbers look wrong before you start, check where your center actually sits with the stick drift test, because a stick resting off center makes one end of every axis look short and the other look long.

Range Is Not the Same as Circularity

These two get mixed up constantly, so it is worth separating them properly before you read your numbers.

The circularity test asks whether your stick traces a round shape when you roll it around the outer edge. It is a question about form. Is the gate a circle, a square, an oval, or a circle with a bite out of it.

This test asks a simpler question. How big is it. Does the stick actually deliver the full 1.00 the game expects, in each of the four directions, and do the two ends of each axis match each other.

You can fail either one on its own. A stick can trace a beautifully round shape at 0.88, which is perfectly circular and 12 percent short everywhere. A stick can hit a full 1.00 in every cardinal direction and still be an oval, because circularity is decided by what happens between the cardinals. Running both is how you tell a range problem from a shape problem, and they have different fixes.

The Four Numbers

Reach

How far the stick travelled in each direction, on a scale where 1.00 is full travel. Above 0.97 is healthy. Between 0.90 and 0.97 is workable but measurably short. Below 0.90 means you are losing more than a tenth of your available movement in that direction, which starts to matter in games that use thresholds.

Axis symmetry

The gap between the two ends of the same axis. A stick reaching 0.99 left and 0.87 right has a symmetry error of 0.12, and that is a specific fault rather than general wear. It means one side of the sensor track or one side of the housing has degraded while the other has not. Under 0.02 is excellent. Past 0.08 is worth investigating, because asymmetric wear tends to get worse rather than level off.

Axis balance

The gap between the total range on X and the total range on Y. This is the one that quietly ruins diagonals. If X spans 2.00 and Y spans 1.74, every diagonal input gets pulled toward the horizontal, because you are sending a bigger number sideways than upward for the same physical effort. You will never notice it as a range problem. You will notice it as diagonals that feel slightly wrong, and the eight-direction accuracy test is the page that measures that consequence directly.

Center offset

Where the midpoint of your measured span sits relative to true zero. If you reached 0.95 right and 0.99 left, your midpoint sits slightly left of zero, which usually means the stick is resting off center rather than that one side is short. This is drift wearing a range problem as a disguise, and the tool flags it when it sees it.

What a Deadzone Actually Costs You

This is the part of the page worth reading even if your range is perfect, because almost nobody does this arithmetic.

A deadzone removes movement from the bottom of your range. Your reach limits how much there is at the top. The two compound, and the result is smaller than most people expect.

A stick reaching a full 1.00 with a 0.10 deadzone gives you 0.90 of usable travel. Fine. A stick reaching 0.88 with the same 0.10 deadzone gives you 0.78, which is 13 percent less movement to work with. Every degree of aim, every steering angle and every walking speed now has to fit into a band that is more than a tenth smaller, using the same physical thumb movement. Precision drops and nothing on screen explains why.

It gets worse in the direction people usually go. A worn stick often needs a larger deadzone to suppress the noise it has developed, so the person with the shortest reach is also the person raising the deadzone. Reach 0.86 with a deadzone of 0.18 leaves 0.68 of usable travel, which is nearly a quarter less than a healthy setup.

The table in the results section runs these numbers against your own measurement. If it looks bad, the answer is usually not a bigger deadzone. Work out the smallest one that genuinely does the job with the joystick deadzone test, and check whether the noise forcing your hand is even coming from the stick using the stick jitter test, since a surprising amount of it comes from cables and ports instead.

The Slow Sweep and Why Flat Spots Matter

Reach tells you where the stick ends up. It says nothing about how it got there, and how it got there is where a different class of fault lives.

In sweep mode, you push out from center to the edge over about three seconds and the tool counts how many readings landed in each slice of the range. Push at a steady speed and a healthy stick spreads those readings out evenly, because the reported value climbs steadily with your thumb. That gives a flat, even histogram.

A worn sensor does not do that. It produces two signatures, and they feel completely different in play.

A flat spot shows as a tall column. The reported value stopped moving while your thumb kept going, so dozens of readings piled up at the same number. In a game this is the stick that will not respond for the first part of a movement and then catches up all at once. Most people describe it as sticky aim and blame the game.

A jump shows as an empty column. The value skipped over a range entirely, so nothing landed there. In play this is aim that lurches. You move a small amount and the crosshair travels further than you asked.

Both come from the same underlying cause on a potentiometer stick, which is an uneven resistive track. Both are invisible to a reach measurement, because the stick still arrives at 1.00. It just took a strange route.

One honest caveat. This measures the distribution of reported values against time, not against real physical travel, so it depends on you pushing at a steady speed. Push in a rush and pause halfway and you will produce a column that looks exactly like a flat spot. Do it two or three times, and only trust a column that appears in the same place every run.

Why Short Range Happens

You are not pushing all the way

Start here, because it is the most common answer by a wide margin. People push the stick until it feels far enough rather than until it physically stops. On most controllers there is another two or three degrees of travel past where a relaxed thumb naturally stops, and that is often the difference between 0.93 and 1.00. Push until you feel the housing, not until it feels done.

Extended thumbstick caps

A taller cap changes where your thumb sits and where it stops. It also gives you more leverage, which usually means more reach rather than less, so if your numbers jumped after fitting caps that is why. Test with and without so you know which set of numbers is your baseline.

Software scaling

Steam Input, DS4Windows, reWASD and vendor apps all offer range settings, and a profile you configured months ago can quietly be capping your output. This is common enough to check first on a controller that suddenly reads short. The controller mapping tool shows you the raw values arriving, and the gamepad viewer lets you watch them move while you toggle a setting on and off.

A worn housing

The plastic bowl the stick pivots in wears, and worn plastic sometimes lets the stick travel further rather than less. Short range from the housing side usually comes from debris packed into the gate stopping the stick early, which is worth checking before anything more serious.

A tired sensor

The genuine hardware answer. A potentiometer track that has worn at the ends stops delivering its full swing. This is the case where symmetry matters, because wear is rarely even, and it is the case that gets worse over time rather than staying put.

Replacement modules

Worth knowing if you have had a stick replaced. Aftermarket modules, including many hall effect kits, do not always match the range of the part they replaced. A perfectly functional replacement can read 0.94 where the original read 1.00, and no amount of cleaning changes that. If your range dropped right after a repair, that is almost certainly why, and range scaling in software is the appropriate fix rather than another teardown.

Where Short Range Actually Bites

Most games scale your input, so losing a bit off the top often just means slightly slower movement. The places it genuinely hurts are the places with a threshold.

Walk and run thresholds. Many games switch from walking to running somewhere around 0.70 of travel. A stick reaching 0.88 crosses that at a different point in its physical movement than a stick reaching 1.00, so your walking band is compressed and your character breaks into a run earlier than you expect.

Full throttle and full lock. Driving games map the top of your range to maximum steering. If you cannot reach 1.00, you cannot reach full lock, and a hairpin that should be one clean turn becomes a correction.

Maximum turn speed. Shooters cap turn rate at full deflection. A short stick means your fastest possible turn is slower than everybody else's, permanently, in that direction only.

Dash and dodge inputs. Games that read a fast push past a threshold need you to actually cross it. A short axis makes those inputs less reliable, and it will feel like inconsistent execution.

If movement feels wrong but your range comes back clean here, the cause is usually elsewhere. Overshoot when you release the stick is measured by the snapback test, and delay between your thumb and the screen belongs to the latency test.

Fixing It

Free things worth trying first

• Push harder into the gate and remeasure. Half the short readings on the internet are technique.
• Blow compressed air around the base of the stick while working it through its full range. Debris in the gate is a real and common cause.
• Recalibrate through your console or vendor software, which resets the endpoints the driver considers full travel.
• Close any remapping software and remeasure, in case a profile is scaling your output down.

Range scaling

If the hardware genuinely tops out at 0.90, scaling multiplies your output so the edge of your travel reports as 1.00. Steam Input can do this, as can most remapping tools. It is a legitimate fix and it restores your thresholds.

It has one cost worth knowing about. Scaling multiplies everything, including the noise. A stick with a 0.005 hiss scaled up by 11 percent now has a 0.0056 hiss. That is nothing on a clean stick and it is not nothing on a noisy one, so measure your noise before you lean on scaling. The stick jitter test gives you that number in about ten seconds.

Repair

Asymmetric wear that keeps getting worse means the module rather than the housing, and a module swap is the real answer. The part is inexpensive and the soldering is the cost. The teardown and the safety notes in the controller repair guide apply here, since it is the same disassembly.

When to leave it alone

Reach above 0.97 with good symmetry is a healthy stick and there is nothing to gain from chasing the last three percent. A consistent shortfall on a replacement module is a characteristic of the part rather than a fault. And if only one direction reads short while everything else is perfect, check that direction on the circularity test before opening anything, since a single short direction is a shape problem and a whole short axis is a range problem.

Method and Honest Limits

What 1.00 actually means

Worth being precise about this, because it changes how you read your own numbers. The value your browser receives has already been through the controller firmware and the operating system driver, both of which normalise it. A reading of 1.00 means the reported value has saturated. It does not prove the stick reached its mechanical stop, and a stick reporting 0.90 is not necessarily 10 percent short mechanically. It might be a driver scaling choice.

What this means in practice is that the comparisons are more reliable than the absolutes. Left against right on the same axis, X against Y on the same stick, this controller against that controller, today against six months from now. Those all mean something. A single number in isolation means less than it appears to.

Sampling

Readings arrive in step with your display refresh, so a 60Hz screen gives about sixty a second. That is plenty for capturing a maximum, since you hold the edge for a moment. It matters more in sweep mode, where a faster display gives you a smoother histogram. If you want to know how often the pad reports underneath that, the polling rate test shows it.

Wireless

A dropped packet at the moment you hit the edge can cost you the peak. Test wired for the measurement you plan to keep. If your readings differ between sessions, check the link with the connection stability test and the pack with the battery health test.

Both sticks, and save the numbers

Range drops slowly, so a reading today is worth much more when there is a reading from six months ago sitting next to it. Save the report each time, and if you want the wider picture on the rest of the pad, the full controller tester covers every input in one pass.

Browser and Platform Notes

• Chrome and Edge report axis values most consistently. Firefox works. Safari is the least predictable of the three.
• Keep this tab focused. Background tabs get throttled and sampling stops, which will cost you a peak.
• Some third party controllers only expose their axes properly in DirectInput mode, usually reached with a button combination involving Home. If nothing moves, that is the first thing to try, and the controller checker will confirm whether the browser can see the pad at all.
• The axis mapping selector covers pads that put the right stick on unusual axis numbers.
• Everything runs locally in the page. Nothing about your controller or your results leaves your device.

Questions People Actually Ask

My stick only reaches 0.93. Is it broken?

Probably not. Push harder into the gate and measure again, then close any remapping software and try once more. Genuine hardware shortfall is less common than technique and software scaling combined.

Why does one side of an axis reach further than the other?

Either your stick is resting off center, which shifts the whole measurement, or one side of the sensor has worn more than the other. The center offset reading in the results tells you which.

Should I worry about a small difference between X and Y?

Under about 0.03 of total range, no. Past 0.08 it starts pulling your diagonals toward one axis, and that is worth measuring properly with the eight-direction accuracy test.

Does range scaling hurt anything?

It amplifies noise along with signal. On a clean stick that is irrelevant. On a noisy one it is not, so measure the noise first.

My hall effect replacement reads short. Did I install it wrong?

Not necessarily. Replacement modules often have different range characteristics from the original part. If everything else is healthy, scale it in software rather than opening the controller again.

Is more range always better?

Up to full travel, yes. Beyond that it makes no difference, because the value saturates at 1.00 and the extra physical movement is simply discarded.

How is this different from a drift test?

A drift test measures what the stick reports when you are not touching it. This measures what it reports when you push it as far as it goes. Opposite ends of the same stick, and they fail independently.

Does it work on a phone or tablet?

Yes, with a controller connected over Bluetooth or through an adapter. The bars and the histogram both scale down.