Everything Tests Perfectly But The Game Still Feels Delayed And Floaty

I work with competitive players on exactly this complaint and it is usually real, so let us take it seriously rather than dismissing it.

Your test results are genuinely clean, which is more informative than it sounds. It means the controller, the cable and the input path to the operating system are all fine, and 12ms wired is a good figure. The delay you feel is therefore being added somewhere after that, and the chain has more links than people expect: the game engine's own input sampling, frame pacing and buffering, the GPU's render queue, any frame generation or upscaling, your display's processing, and your refresh rate. Several of those can change without you touching them, through a graphics driver update, a game patch, or a monitor setting that reset.

The floaty description is a useful clue, because it is characteristic rather than vague. Floaty usually means inconsistent timing rather than extra delay: when frame time varies, your stick input lands a different number of milliseconds into each frame, and aiming stops feeling connected even though the average delay is unchanged. That is why a perfect controller can coexist with a bad feel, and why it is hard to describe to friends who are not experiencing it.

The other possibility worth naming honestly is aim assist and deadzone settings inside the game. Game patches change these, often without a note, and a wider in-game deadzone or a retuned aim curve feels exactly like floatiness. Check your in-game values against what you remember setting, because if a patch reset them that is both the cause and an easy fix.