Inconsistent on Dualsense? Check your controller!!

[Haitauer]

Stick drift is nothing new on sonys gamepads, but i think there is more to it in GT7. Even unnoticeable stickdrift is "amplified" by the baked-in driving assist. Even on perfectly working controller even if you turn off all assists you can clearly see how the game manipulates your steering angle even if you keep the stick all the way left/right and dont move it. Easiest to notice coming out of a long turn and hilding the stick fully turned the game begins to straighten your steering angle automatically. If someone doesnt believe this, I have very clear videos to proove it.😂 Why they dont give us an option of actual direct input on DS is another story.

I moved from a wheel to controller some time ago after a decade on wheels. This week I have been first time driving daily race B at Dragontrail to the point where I have somewhat achieved some consistency in my driving and lap times. Then this happened. I was very consistently running low 1.47s and high 1.46s for couple of days and today I went back and was stuck at 1.48-1.48.5s - so not a small difference. The car just didnt want to turn and most noticeably the car was constantly "leaking" out coming out of long corners like the second part of the first shikane (T3?) and the turn at the end of the back straight before the shikane of death. I was 110% sure I was able to power out of these turns with full throttle before. I also struggled to turn in to the hairpin at the back of the track (T5?). I nearly destroyed my DR A before I realized the reason. I was on a different controller. Now - i did know this controller has very slight stickdrift issues, just didnt remember. These issues are so very slight 99% of time or 100% of the time in games its undetectable. I have only occasionally noticed it as in the menus the cursor creeps upwards ever so slightly.

Now why do I think this barely noticeable drift is absolutely devastating in competitive GT7 racing? Well you read it before - the car understeers a lot more. I figure as the sticks natural motion area is a circle instead of a cross, the very slight upward drift is actually making my 100% L/R inputs bleed off as if I was turning the stick to front left/ front right and that is registered as less than 100% L/R input. I also think there are micro movements in stickdrift that are filtered off in the menus, but while driving these slight movements are interpretted as you, the player, bleeding off the steering angle and then amplified by the baked-in steering aid.

And what is the outcome? Well good luck to you as you now have more understeering car than the rest and the only way to fix this in Daily races with fixed setups is to buy a new controller. And as we all know propably 99% of more than a year old Dualsense controllers have either more or less noticeable stickdrift. As I just showed, even otherwise unnoticeable drift cost me 1-1,5 seconds in one lap of Dragontrail. That is the difference between top3 and bottom three in qualifying or race. That is up to 1%.. in a track like Nordschleife we could be talking over five seconds per lap. And all this just because of the crappy components used in the controllers. And if you have only one controller you wont even notice the problem.

Well what could they do to the problem? Obviously making some decent controllers would help, but since that is not a realistic option we could use an unfiltered direct input mode for the controller and even more preferrably adjustable deadzones, so we could filter this vertical drift off by addind just a bit of vertical deadzone.

Attached is THAT controller in "DualSense Tester".

 

[Meythia]

Supposedly, there are websites that can recalibrate the firmware.
Never tried, never experienced.

But all your wall of text - seems a bit of a misinterpretation.
From my understanding stick drift does add a slight input when the stick is in resting position instead of 0% input it should have,
but it doesnt take away from 100% of any direction because it does not "move" the range off center.

Anyway, I do agree to anyone saying the game should have an option to disable the steering aid - for better or worse.

 

[Haitauer]

Supposedly, there are websites that can recalibrate the firmware.
Never tried, never experienced.

But all your wall of text - seems a bit of a misinterpretation.
From my understanding stick drift does add a slight input when the stick is in resting position instead of 0% input it should have,
but it doesnt take away from 100% of any direction because it does not "move" the range off center.

Anyway, I do agree to anyone saying the game should have an option to disable the steering aid - for better or worse.

I am afraid you might be wrongly optimistic on the stickdrift only affecting resting position and not 100%. See if the game is trying to interpret your input based on the circular not square 2D area of XY and you add input to vertical Y vector the calculation of the combined X/Y vectors are no longer 100% input on X. I think the actual position range/plain for the stick in Dualsense is somewhere between a circle and a rouded corner square, but for sure its not a straight cornered square. And in addition to that we add the software in the game and how it interprets your inputs. This is what I mean by unnoticeable stickdrift as in menus the cursor propably has a bit of a deadzone by software, but this is not present while you are driving.

And yes its a wall of text, but I wanted to be abundantly clear what I have noticed and interpreted. I can tell you I drove a lot of laps on this drift controller struggling to turn the car out of long corners and then I swapped a newer controller from the fly and shaved of that 1-1.5 seconds right away.

 

[Lomic]

If someone doesnt believe this, I have very clear videos to proove it.

 

[benjoi84]

Do we really need another thread about faulty input devices being responsible for players' shortcomings?

 

[Haitauer]

Do we really need another thread about faulty input devices being responsible for players' shortcomings?

I really dont see your point. In this case it is the exact opposite. Nothing to do with shotcomings as I went straight back to faster times by changing controller on the fly. And I didnt expect this myself either - was pretty surpriced to find the reason why my times suddenly went bad. Like I said - a decade on steering wheel before this and another decade of Gran Turismo with controllers before that, so I assume I have an idea when something behaves funny in a game.

 

[Wilsonson]

Could you please explain what the numbers on the screen shot mean?

I will definitely try and see if there is a difference between my 16 and 4 month old controllers.

Tbh it sounds awfully plausible. At least very possible. I am usually very sceptical but my ******** o meter doesn't really tingle here.

Also this is not someone looking for excuses for their failings. He is perfectly happy with his performance on one controller but fails with the other. We don't really wanna tell him to just git gud at the other controller do we?

 

[Meythia]

Could you please explain what the numbers on the screen shot mean?

They reflect the controllers motion sensor readings.
The website the screenshot is taken from can also read stick input.
Ideally, it should read 0 on all stick axis, but a bit of wiggle is normal and will be filtered out - as the method used for creating the input is not totally reliable.
When stick drift occurs, the readings will pass that filter threshold and thus the software connected will understand it as player input.