8Bitdo Pro 2 Wireless Controller: Quick Review and Latency Test

Today we are going to take a quick look at the 8bitdo pro2 wireless controller – to see the features, overall usability , practicality and perhaps most importantly, the response speed or latency as compared to the xbox controller, Dualsense and a couple of other options. We are also going to see how it fares on an Android tablet and iOS an iPad on both native games as well as while streaming. Let’s take a quick look at the feature set. The controller comes with a rechargeable battery and charges via type C port. In my experience, the battery is more than adequate for long sessions to easily last through several days..

One special party trick it does have is the ability to swap out the rechargeable battery with a pair of regular AA cells – so in case you run out of juice during an intense session, you always have this option – and at least in my book , flexbility always trumps proprietary. The buttons are nice and tactile, the analogue triggers have a great balance – although they aren’t adaptive like the dualsense. I do really like the D-pad but again, I stick to mostly modern games that do not use it much and some retro gamers may find it inadequate. Alright, enough of context – lets get into the testing! Pairing is par for course, with one crucial difference. This controller offers four different mode options by Operating system that.

Can be selected via a physical switch on the back. While the manual suggests using D-Pad mode for iOS, in my experience, Most modern operating systems including Android, iOS , Mac and Windows perform the best with XInput mode. The Nintendo Switch however does need the specialized Nintendo Mode So Let’s see how it feels while streaming on nVidia Gamestream Damn, it feels absolutely great- now on to the latency tests For this, we are first going to use a native game , dead cells . Since systems cannot tell the latency by themself, we will use slow motion capture to assess the delay. Now Closely watch the gap between a button press , the action to be seen on the screen.

And the stopwatch running on the side. To my untrained eyes, I honestly don’t see the gap to be more than 10 millseconds at most – which is pretty much as good as it gets Time to bring out the XBOX Series X controller. Now to my eyes, I don’t honestly see any difference at all. Both the controllers seem to be doing a really really good job at keeping the response times rather fast. Let’s see how the newly acquired low cost find – The Ninjadog Astra One fares. Again, I can’t really find anything to complain about – I suppose Bluetooth stacks have now come to a point where they are almost as good as wired. Bear in mind, “Almost”! Alright, time to bring back the 8bitdo, make things a little more.

Difficult this time android + gamestream to make things a little more difficult for it Since I did not spot any noticeable issues in the last test, I decided to grab motion captures at 960fps. Overall, i find it a beautiful and rather well made controller. The ability to maintain multiple pairings is a big bonus, at least for me. The controller accuracy is as good as it gets – and the connection latency too is pretty solid. Overall for me It’s a 9/10 and a solid recommendation. Get it if you can find one. Thank you for watching!