Steam controller mouse movement choppy (wired connection)

[Max Shadow]

I recently noticed my Steam Controller trackpad is not working perfectly fine. I sweep my finger over it trying to keep the same speed, but the mouse moves like there were "bumps" on the trackpad, like every few miliseconds it slows down for an instant, making the movement a bit choppy. The gyro seems to be working fine, and I'm testing it on desktop, even with Steam closed. Is it a hardware problem? I have bought it a few months ago, it shouldn't break that fast. Any help would be appreciated.

[cammelspit]

Most games are simply not set up to be ideal with the SC by default. What you need to do is lower the in-game mouse sensitivity AS FAR DOWN AS IT CAN GO. No, seriously, if your game has an INI you can edit to make it lower, do it. make it to where you would have to move a mouse half a mile to get the cursor to budge at all. Then from there, you want to use the Steam configurator to adjust the actual mouse speed. The physical trackpad actually senses a huge amount of data from your thumbs but most games default settings are intended for a mouse with maybe 300-600 DPI. To deal with this, the unchanged defaults for the SC are very insensitive, essentially throwing out a huge amount of data points so that your mouse will move at a reasonable speed for most games. What loweri9ng the in-game sensitivity does is it makes the game need way more 'ticks' to move the same amount of distance, which the SC can EASILY do. Think of this like you are increasing the DPI of the virtual mouse from say, 300 to more like 30,000.

The gyro also suffers from this, but generally, most people will use the gyro with higher sensitivity so they can make larger movements in a game which is why it may not feel as bad. Either way, you will also have to adjust the gyro sensitivity in the Steam configurator because that and the pad control the same virtual mouse. Trust me, I do this with every game I can and it makes a MASSIVE difference.

I had also made a write up about this and have some other tips and such in an old guide I made.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=595597298

You would be especially interested in the section about "Sensitivity, Smoothing and Acceleration Adjustments"

Good Luck, and happy gaming! 😁👍

[Max Shadow]

Umm, the mouse looks choppy in desktop mode, it's not related to any game. It's not very noticeable, so it MAY be just my thumb not moving at a constant speed, but it's weird that the "bumps" (when it deaccelerates) happen at regular intervals, like certain spots on the trackpad were defective. If I move the thumb quickly it's not noticeable, but it is when doing slow sweeps. Anyway, thanks for the tips, I've read that guide some time ago, it helped me learn a few tricks in the config, nice job.

[Izygoi]

when we can got the steam controller

[MartyWF]

Originally posted by Max Shadow:

I recently noticed my Steam Controller trackpad is not working perfectly fine. I sweep my finger over it trying to keep the same speed, but the mouse moves like there were "bumps" on the trackpad, like every few miliseconds it slows down for an instant, making the movement a bit choppy. The gyro seems to be working fine, and I'm testing it on desktop, even with Steam closed. Is it a hardware problem? I have bought it a few months ago, it shouldn't break that fast. Any help would be appreciated.

I ran into this problem several times already...
Exit Steam In the System Tray...
Turn off SC...
Run Steam...
Move the cursor over the steam Icon in the system tray...
Turn on SC...
Wait for the confirmation that your controller is turned on(It will say account has loaded for SC) It will then say the name of your config...
wait for 5 seconds...
Repeatably Left click the steam Controller (Left Mouse Button) on the controller
Test the issue...

See if that solves this for you!!
I sometimes have to do this and even then It does not work all the way all the time...

If none of this works Repeat several times...Till you get it right...
You may even need to reboot... I sometimes have to when this happens..

Post back whether this helps or not.. So others will know..

Cheers and Good Luck Gaming

MartyWF

[Pale Face 'n Skin]

I was actually about to post a new thread but I guess I'll bump this one. It sounds like OP and I are experiencing the same thing, except I just got mine and it's been doing this since I started using it. To me, the mouse input looks like movement in your common VR game. It works but it looks a little off-putting, and it's especially noticeable with diagonal movement. Mouse Joystick solves this problem quite well however the trade-off is the range of movement is much smaller in a single swipe. This is something I'm getting the hang of in Killing Floor 2 but not Skyrim, so I'm basically stuck noticing this every time I'm looking about in Skyrim. I've tried the sensitivity thing already but not with the ini file, so I'll give that a go. Mouse smoothing doesn't seem to help much IMO. I have to almost max it out just to see a tiny difference.

With that being said, is there a way to compensate with the small range of movement accompanying Jmouse? If there is then that would probably be the best substitute. The mouse input style in both these games makes it look like my frame rate is dipping when it's really not and I can barely tolerate it.

[Max Shadow]

I did some tests, you can find them in this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamController/comments/bqnucm/right_trackpad_not_smooth/

About mouse joystick, that mode simulates joystick input, which has a relative range of -1 and 1 for each axis. This means that the sensibility is limited by the joystick sensibility setting in your game. It's not possible to make it faster through steam controller config. The problem is I don't know how to tell Steam how fast I have to swipe to get the maximum output, so the precision is much worse than native mouse mode. Plus, some games have software deadzone which cannot be changed and makes Mouse Joystick mode extremely choppy and unresponsive. There are a couple of settings to minimize that problem, but it's still not the best experience.

[MartyWF]

Have you tried a new micro-usb cable yet?? Or a new usb port?? This seems to have permanately solved this for me.... My issues were wireless if that matters...
Try that and post back so others will know...

Cheers and good luck!!
MartyWF

[Pale Face 'n Skin]

Well I've been using wireless this whole time so I just tried using the micro USB cord only and nothing changed. Changing the sensitivity in Skyrim ini to 0 made camera movement immobilized so that didn't help either. I also tried doing the same Paint test as Max but my lines are pretty smooth diagonally, so Idk where that leaves me. Maybe my issue is unique, it's just hard to tell unless everyone posted a video of their problem. I guess I'll just deal with it and cross my fingers that a future update will solve this.

[MartyWF]

I tried to help...
Sorry!!

MartyWF

[Astronautduel]

I've been having the same issue for months. Trackpad mouse was really smooth before, now it feels very imprecise and shaky. If you move your finger across the pad very slowly in a game in mouse mode, do you see the camera moving in small steps and not smoothly at all?

Mouse-like joystick is smoother but you lose speed and fine movement.

Hopefully this gets fixed soon, because it's made mouse mode unusable for me.

[Pale Face 'n Skin]

Originally posted by Astronautduel:

I've been having the same issue for months. Trackpad mouse was really smooth before, now it feels very imprecise and shaky. If you move your finger across the pad very slowly in a game in mouse mode, do you see the camera moving in small steps and not smoothly at all?

Mouse-like joystick is smoother but you lose speed and fine movement.

Hopefully this gets fixed soon, because it's made mouse mode unusable for me.

To me it seems like that. But it's hard to say if my issue is exactly the same as the next guy's. I noticed firmware updates are kinda rare and the last one was over a year ago. So I guess that begs the question if this is an issue that develops over time from normal use or a defect, rather than a previous update.

[MartyWF]

Have you repositioning the Steam Controller dongle away from EMI ( From blue tooth, wi fi, ds4, ps4, ds3, ps4, xbox cell phones, wireless phones )and other radio sources ???

This would help you some... If this applies try it.. At most it might work ( Then again...)..Make sure the dongle is far way...
Try a different Usb posrt... 2.0, 3.0, 3.1... and see if this and repositioning help you any...
It could be your stem controller have poor connectivity from wireless activity near your dongle...
Also try a new usb cord with the dongle.. It was this for me...

Cheers and Good Luck Gaming!!

[Max Shadow]

I'm having this problem with wired connection, but thanks anyway. I'll update the post title to make it clear.

[Yuri Bezmenov]

Originally posted by Max Shadow:

I recently noticed my Steam Controller trackpad is not working perfectly fine. I sweep my finger over it trying to keep the same speed, but the mouse moves like there were "bumps" on the trackpad, like every few miliseconds it slows down for an instant, making the movement a bit choppy. The gyro seems to be working fine, and I'm testing it on desktop, even with Steam closed. Is it a hardware problem? I have bought it a few months ago, it shouldn't break that fast. Any help would be appreciated.

I made mine much smoother, buy unplugging my old xbox 360 fightstick , I would test by removing all other usb devices, there could be something conflicting , cutting your Steam Controllers pooling rate in half.. just a hunch. Also i would update your chipset drivers to latest, if you can.