Razer’s Wolverine V4 Controller Is Overkill For Most Gamers, And That’s The Point

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Razer has officially revealed the next entry in its line of high-end gaming controllers, the Wolverine V4 for Xbox and PC. Geared toward competitive gamers–not that there’s anything stopping you from using it to play Vampire Survivors–and it focuses primarily on polling performance and thumbstick sensor architecture.

One of the biggest changes is Razer choosing capacitive contactless sensors backed by a 16-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for the thumbsticks, rather than the usual Hall Effect magnetic sensor. While Hall Effect thumbsticks are popular for their durability and for essentially eliminating stick drift, they can be prone to magnetic interference. Not a dealbreaker if you’re playing at home, but in a competitive scene where victory is measured in fractions of a second, this can be an issue. In comparison, Razer is aiming to offer the same drift resistance, finer granularity, and smoother signal tracking with capacitive sensing.

Then there’s the polling rate, which is absurdly high. For example, a DualSense Edge is capable of offering up to 1,000Hz (1 ms to 8 ms input latency), but the Wolverine V4 pushes that number up to 8,000Hz in both its wired and wireless configurations when used on PC, which, in theory, should put that