Measurements and tests
Motion sensors
Pads such as the DualSense, the DualShock 4 and the Switch Pro Controller have a gyroscope, which reads how fast the pad turns, and an accelerometer, which reads the push on it, gravity included. Xbox pads have neither.
What the sensors read
The Motion tab draws a 3D pad turned as yours is. An arrow from it is what the accelerometer feels: gravity, straight down at 1 g while the pad is still, longer or shorter as it is pushed. Curved arrows turn round it as the gyroscope reads, further and brighter the faster it turns, in degrees a second.
Under it, the six values scroll by over the last five seconds, the gyroscope's and the accelerometer's in a plot each, whose range grows and shrinks with what they show: from ±90 to ±2,000 °/s, and from ±2 to ±16 g.
Where they can be read
The browser's Gamepad API doesn't pass the sensors on. There the Motion tile offers Use WebHID, which reads them straight from the pad in Chrome and Edge, or else says Not readable here. The Windows app reads them too. A Sony pad on Bluetooth sends them only once it is switched to its full report.
Read more in Not measurable here
Tilt, and why yaw drifts
The 3D pad turns by adding up the gyroscope's turns, in all three axes at once. Gravity holds its tilt true: whenever the accelerometer reads close to 1 g, the tilt is pulled back to it, gently while the pad moves and within a second while it lies still, so a push or a shake never tips it.
Yaw, the turn about gravity, has nothing to hold it, so it can wander slowly. Recentre turns it back to zero, facing the way the pad faces now.
The gyroscope's drift
A gyroscope at rest rarely reads exactly zero. Lay the pad still for a second, and PadBench measures what it reads then, its drift, and takes it out of every turn after, so the 3D pad holds still too. The Motion tab shows the drift it measured.