Can a Dualshock 4 replace a Xbox 360 controller on the PC?

I decided to buy a Dualshock 4 and see for myself what works and what doesn't.

First off: As promised, the Dualshock 4 works on Windows without the need to install additional drivers.¹ Connection is established via a Micro-B USB cable, or via Bluetooth on computers with a Bluetooth receiver. (Hold down the Home and Share buttons together for several seconds to enable Bluetooth pairing mode. The light bar will continuously flash when pairing mode is activated.)

Game support is extremely lacking. The Dualshock 4 is a DirectInput device while the Xbox 360 controller uses XInput, which is the only API that most - if not all - modern games use. In order to use the Dualshock 4 in games that only support the Xbox 360 controller, a wrapper is needed². Here's to hoping Sony will release drivers to add XInput support to the Dualshock 4.

As for the default key-mapping; even if games accept input from the Dualshock 4, you might want to calibrate the controller to match the Xbox 360 controller's key mapping.
Matching inputs are:

• Left analog stick: main X/Y Axis
• D-Pad: Point of View Hat
• Y/: button 4
• LB/L1: button 5
• RB/R1: button 6

The Xbox 360 controller uses 3 Axis and 2 Rotations as input for its two analog sticks and 2 triggers; the triggers both share the Z-Axis.
The Dualshock 4 on the other hand uses 3 Axis and 3 Rotations for the same.

According to Windows' very own Game controller settings:
The Xbox 360 offers a total of 10 buttons³.
The Dualshock 4 offers a total of 14 buttons⁴.

¹: Tested on Windows 7 and 8.1
²: I found one such wrapper here
³: Excluding the home button, which does not seem to map to a controller input
⁴: 2 buttons are mapped to the L2/R2 triggers, which are also mapped to the X and Y Rotations

Well as stated before the dualshock 4 works with no aditional drivers in a cable and bluetooth connection to a PC.

Note: i only tested with windows 8.1, but sources say it also works on win7 and win8, but in win7 the bluetooth connection keeps getting lost sometimes. I read somewhere enabling a option in the bluetooth driver settings will fix that, dunno what exactly tough.

Wathever the connection cable/bluetooth windows will install the drivers needed on the fly.

Everything works normally except the touchpad and headset function, still.. sometimes my windows detects a bluetooth headset, and im pretty sure its from the Dualshock4, i need to spend more time checking that out.

Regarding game support, its pretty limited, if you have a game able to costumize gamepad direct inputs, should work fine.. (like some emulators) but most games only have support for a few gamepads, and xbox360 is normally one of them.

So for now, if you want full compatibility in games "xboxce" driver or something called DS4tool (its pretty recent) should do the trick. Anyways i suspect any tool that allows to remap a general gamepad to a xbox360 pad should work.

Im sure there are other ways, and im sure in the future the support will be way better, the dualshock3 PC support years ago was awful (lets say NON existent) and ended up great, still use it everyday. ("better DS3" rocks ^^)

So im sure with dualshock 4 things will be even better in the near future.