My Touchpad Click Works But Swipe Gestures Do Nothing In Games

Your hardware is healthy, and your test result proving both halves work is exactly what makes the diagnosis clean.

On a PC, the touchpad is reported in two very different ways. The click is a simple button, and it maps across to XInput as a standard button, which is why every game sees it. The touch surface itself, the position data your test is displaying, is a Sony-specific feature that XInput has no concept of. So a game reading your controller through XInput receives a button press and nothing else, regardless of how perfectly the surface works. The games listing swipe controls in their menus are describing their PlayStation console behaviour, and those menus are frequently not adjusted for the PC build, which is why the options appear and do nothing.

The fix, where a fix exists, is Steam Input. Steam reads the DualSense natively rather than through XInput, so it can see the touch surface, and it can bind swipes, touch zones and trackpad-style movement to whatever the game does understand: keys, buttons or mouse movement. You configure it per game in Steam's controller settings. It is a translation rather than the game truly supporting the touchpad, but in practice it gets you the behaviour you want.

Two honest limits. First, a game that only accepts a discrete input cannot be given a continuous swipe, so you are mapping a swipe to a key press rather than to a smooth gesture. That is fine for a map pan or a weapon wheel and less good for anything analog. Second, over standard Bluetooth on PC the DualSense exposes less than it does over USB, so use the cable for this.

So nothing needs repairing, and whether you get swipe gestures depends on the game and on whether you are willing to configure Steam Input for it.