How to Fix Stick Drift on Your PS5 Controller

howtogeek.com:

A misbehaving PS5 controller is a major annoyance that makes basic in-game movement and aiming a chore. Here are some tips you can use to resolve the issue and get back in the game.

What is Stick Drift?

Stick drift is a fairly self-explanatory term for an analog stick that moves without any explicit movement from the player. This manifests as unwanted movement within a game, whether it’s the on-screen reticle moving on its own or your character slowly drifting in a particular direction.

The problem is a result of wear to the mechanical potentiometers used in most game controllers. These mechanisms use a sliding contact to measure a change in voltage, which corresponds with a value on the X and Y axis. As these contacts become worn or dirty, stick drift can occur due to incorrect readings being registered.

Stick drift isn’t always predictable. It can appear and disappear from one moment to the next, but it invariably leads to the feeling that you can’t trust your controller. With potentiometer-based controllers, it’s usually a matter of when not if stick drift will occur.

Once stick drift starts, the problem is unlikely to go away on its own. The problem is likely to only get worse and worse until you decide to do something about it. Hall Effect joysticks use magnets which makes them far more resilient to stick drift.

Adjust Dead Zones and Sensitivity

The dead zone refers to the distance you can move a controller before movement is registered. The larger the dead zone, the more you’ll need to move the stick before seeing the result on screen. A larger dead zone can help mask stick drift by essentially ignoring small unwanted inputs.

This is a quick fix, not a long-term solution. Since stick drift is only likely to get worse over time, eventually even this “fix” won’t work. Depending on which DualSense controller you have, it may not work at all since this is a setting you may need to adjust within each game.

For standard DualSense controllers,