Gamepadla+

Gamepad Polling Rate and Latency Testing Tool (CLI & GUI)

Gamepadla+ is a program for measuring the polling rate and synthetic latency of gamepads aka. controllers.

• Supports DInput and XInput
• Provides CLI (Command Line Interface) and GUI (Graphical User Interface)
• Shows polling rate and latency metrics

Installation

Windows

Microsoft Store (Recommended)

Installer

Portable Builds

See the "Assets" section on the release page:

From Source

Using uv:

uv tool install --python 3.11 gamepadla-plus@1.9.0

Linux

Snap (Recommended)

If you are no using Ubuntu, Manjaro or Solus you'll likely have to install snapd first.

sudo snap install gamepadla-plus
sudo snap connect gamepadla-plus:joystick

AppImages and Portable Builds

See the "Assets" section on the release page:

From Source

Using uv:

uv tool install --python 3.11 gamepadla-plus@1.9.0

macOS

From Source

Using uv:

uv tool install --python 3.11 gamepadla-plus@1.9.0

Usage (GUI)

1. Execute the program Gamepadla+ without any arguments.
2. If you haven't connected any controller do it now and click Refresh.
3. Click Test and rotate the stick you chose fast in a circle.
4. Optionally save the result to a JSON file or upload the result to <gamepadla.com>.

Usage (CLI)

# gamepadla-plus --help

 Usage: gamepadla-plus [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

 Gamepad latency and polling rate tester.

╭─ Options ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ --install-completion          Install completion for the current shell.                                            │
│ --show-completion             Show completion for the current shell, to copy it or customize the installation.     │
│ --help                        Show this message and exit.                                                          │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯
╭─ Commands ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ list   List controller id's.                                                                                       │
│ test   Test controller with id.                                                                                    │
╰────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

Getting Started

1. List all controllers connected with:

gamepadla-plus list

# gamepadla-plus list
Found 1 controllers
0. Xbox 360 Controller

2. Test the controller with the id from step one (test defaults to id 0):

gamepadla-plus test 0

equals here

gamepadla-plus test

# gamepadla-plus test
100%|████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ | 00.97 ms


  Parameter                  Value
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
  Gamepad Name               Xbox 360 Controller
  Operating System           Windows
  Polling Rate (p10)         1051.635 Hz

  Average latency            1.001 ms
  Minimal latency            0.879 ms
  Maximum latency            1.127 ms
  Jitter (CV)                4.31 % (normal), 0.043 ms
  Missed Reports             5.80 %

  Outlier lower Avg. (IQR)   0.657 ms
  Outlier lower % (IQR)      9.600 %
  Outlier upper Avg. (IQR)   1.922 ms
  Outlier upper % (IQR)      10.900 %

Options

Test Right Stick

gamepadla-plus test --stick right

Write Result to JSON File

gamepadla-plus test --out data.json

Upload Result to <gamepadla.com>

gamepadla-plus test --upload

Disclaimer

Gamepadla+ measures the delay between successive changes in the position of the analog stick on the gamepad, rather than the traditional input latency, which measures the time between pressing a button on the gamepad and a response in a program or game.
This method of measurement can be affected by various factors, including the quality of the gamepad, the speed of the computer's processor, the speed of event processing in the Pygame library, and so on.
Therefore, although Gamepadla+ can give a general idea of the "response" of a gamepad, it cannot accurately measure input latency in the traditional sense. The results obtained from Gamepadla+ should be used as a guide, not as an exact measurement of input latency.

Contributors

• 2024-2026 Adam McKellar
• 2022-2024 John Punch

Notable Mentions

Gamepadla+ or gamepadla-plus is a hard fork of Gamepadla (known as Polling now).

The testing is based on the method of Christian P.: https://github.com/chrizonix/XInputTest.

Misc.

Result Upload Functionality to gamepadla.com

The upload functionality to gamepadla.com is compatible with Polling v1.3.1.4.

License

Licensed under MIT.

Contributing

Please have a look at DEVELOPMENT.md.