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Genuine question rather than a fault report. I measured my pad on your latency test and I am getting around 11ms wired and around 19ms over Bluetooth. I have no idea whether those are good, average or terrible, because every forum post I read either says anything over 5ms is unplayable or that nobody can feel under 50ms, which are obviously not both true. I play a lot of fighting games so this matters to me more than most. What is a realistic reading and at what point should I actually be worried?
Your numbers are good. Wired 11ms and Bluetooth 19ms are both in the normal band. Worry above roughly 25ms wired or 40ms wireless, or if the figure is unstable rather than high.
Your readings are healthy, and the reason the forum advice contradicts itself is that people quote different things as though they were the same number.
What a browser test measures is the time between the controller's electrical event and the page receiving it: the controller's own polling interval plus the transport plus the browser's event loop. It does not include your monitor, your game engine, or your own reaction time. Published figures like 5ms usually come from lab rigs measuring only the controller's radio and polling, and figures like 50ms are usually whole-chain measurements from button to pixel. Both can be accurate about different things, and neither is comparable to what you just measured.
For the measurement you actually took, these are the practical bands. Wired: 8 to 15ms is normal and good, 15 to 25ms is acceptable, above 25ms is worth investigating. Bluetooth: 15 to 25ms is normal, 25 to 40ms is acceptable, above 40ms is worth investigating. An Xbox Wireless Adapter typically sits between the two. So you are comfortably in the good band on both.
For fighting games, the number that matters more than the average is the consistency. A pad that is always 19ms is far easier to play on than one that averages 14ms but swings between 8 and 30, because your timing adapts to a stable delay and cannot adapt to a variable one. Run the test for a minute or two and watch the spread rather than a single figure. If your spread is tight, stay wired for tournaments for the extra few milliseconds and otherwise stop worrying, because you do not have a problem to fix.
Tested on: DualSense CFI-ZCT1W, Xbox Wireless Controller Model 1914 and 8BitDo Ultimate, each over USB, Bluetooth 5.3 and 2.4GHz dongle where available, on Windows 11 24H2 and macOS 15.3, in Chrome 141 and Firefox 144. Figures cross-checked against a native capture at the driver level.
Checked by Gabriel Silva on . How we verify answers
Low Latency And Input Timing Engineer at Gamepad Tester
Devon is a low latency engineer. On a browser-based latency test the easiest mistake is measuring the wrong thing: network round trips, render queues and browser throttling can all add milliseconds that have nothing to do with the controller. His work is isolating the input path so that what the test reports is the hardware delay, and documenting the conditions under which the reading is trustworthy. On Gamepad Tester he owns the latency test and the input lag topic, and checks any answer that quotes a millisecond figure.
Each answer is written by the specialist who owns that part of the hardware, tested on a real controller, and checked by a second team member. How we verify answers
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