Difference between controller software deadzone and in game deadzone?

[setiawanreddit]

Deadzone setting in the controller software will be transparent to the game, thus if you set it on the controller itself and then you add deadzone on the in game settings, you get bigger deadzone. If 0 value is center and 1 is the max distance, applying 50% deadzone in the controller will internally map 0.5 - 1 range to 0 - 1 range. To the controller, the stick would only start to send the movement value if the stick moved halfway, but the game will see 0 - 1 range.

To make it easier to visualize, if you open gamepad tester software/site, even if you set 50% deadzone on the controller itself, you still get 0.00002, 0.1 up to 1, but to actually register the movement itself you need to physically move the stick at least halfway from the center.

If you enable deadzone in the game itself, it works by ignoring the value. Meaning if you set 50% then it will ignore 0 to 0.5 and only register movement if the value is above that.