The relationship between a player and his favorite game often goes through the hardware he uses. Thanks to Nvidia Reflex technology, we are going to explain to you how to click faster than your opponents and never “lag” against them again.
Whether you use an over-inflated machine purring affectionately at the slightest click of a mouse or an overwhelmed cuckoo clock coughing and spitting to display what you ask of it, nothing beats a computer well accompanied by its software to help him work as efficiently as possible.
This is what researchers working at Nvidia Research have been proposing for several years. Like the Nvidia Reflex software, intended for competitive players or simply wishing to play in the best conditions, we are going to explain to you how this software, very easy to use, will ensure that you never again pester latency and will give you the feeling of being one with your equipment, like the bundle that we invite you to discover and whose description you can find at the end of the article.
Reflex is now a major asset and available on a whole list of more than thirty competitive games including:
- Apex Legends
- Battlefield 2042
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Black Ops Cold War, Vanguard & Warzone
- Destiny 2
- Escape from Tarkov
- Fortnite
- Overwatch
- Rainbow Six: Siege
- Valorant
Content
What is “lag”
Anyone who has ever played online has already complained at least once about the latency between their actions and the rendering in a game. This certainty of having clicked in the right place at the right time to hit their target without having the result discount. If we often blame our Internet connection, it is not responsible for everything and we must measure the impact that your equipment can have on this latency. Latency is in fact the measurement of the time between an action given physically by the player, and the time when this action is recorded and reflected in your game. There are thus several types of latency, whether it is latency network or system.
In the case of Nvidia Reflex, it is the latter that will particularly interest us. Also called “click-to-display”, this latency does not involve the server on which you are evolving but your peripherals as well as your PC and your screen. If it is, so to speak, difficult to act on the network latency, the system latency can on the other hand be optimized to obtain a rendering at the limit of the immediate. A distinction is thus made between the delay in response, the delay in firing or even the delay in the position of the adversaries. This latency is very often very difficult to measure, almost imperceptible but nevertheless very present and impactful, especially on extremely fast and precise games such as FPS such as Call of Duty: Warzone, Fortnite, Valorant, Apex Legends, CS:GO, etc. . This is where Nvidia Reflex software comes in to help.
It should be understood that even a small difference of the order of a few milliseconds can have a huge impact on your actions but also your regularity in responding to your actions. In fact, having the lowest possible system latency allows both to have an almost immediate response on what you want to do but also on your regularity to always shoot in the same way and as precisely as possible.
This is explained by the results obtained by researchers at Nvidia.
“Nvidia Research has discovered that even the smallest differences in system latency (12-20ms) can have a significant difference in your aiming performance. In fact, the average difference in aiming task completion (the time it takes to acquire and shoot a target) between a PC at 12ms and one at 20ms, was measured at 182ms, or about 22 times the difference in system latency.
To put it into perspective, with the same target difficulty, in a Valorant or CS:GO server at 128 ticks, your shots will hit the target on average 23 ticks earlier with the 12ms setting. And again, most players are on systems with system latency ranging from 50 to 100ms!”
So you understand that despite all the goodwill in the world and even with the talent of a ZywOo, not optimizing your system latency is like starting a 100m with a ball attached to your foot, hence the interest of worry about it without further delay.
This is where Nvidia Reflex comes in.
How does Nvidia Reflex work?
As you will have understood, researchers at Nvidia have worked hard to offer an effective solution to players in order to ostensibly reduce your system latency. The goal of Nvidia Reflex is to offer all configurations optimal performance by minimizing the time between the moment you click and the rendering on the screen, the action having to go through your CPU beforehand, the processing of the information, the switch to your graphics card and then to your screen. So many steps during which your information is recorded, processed and then sent back to the game and which constitute a delay that the Reflex software tends to reduce. Reflex thus offers several functionalities to reduce this latency with in particular the Low Latency Boost allowing for example to play with the lowest possible latency while evolving on high resolutions, something that the competitive players avoided doing until now in order to reduce the maximum the calculations required of their equipment.
Reflex therefore allows you to play with the best possible system latency while letting you enjoy the best image quality and an experience that is as pleasant as it is effective. Something which it would be a shame to deprive yourself of with 360 Hz screens and equipped with Nvidia G-Sync If you want to know all the technical details (which we spare you here) to better understand how Nvidia Reflex works, we invite you to visit the dedicated Nvidia page (in English).
It is important to remember that Reflex is intended for the vast majority of Nvidia cards in circulation since the software is designed for graphics cards dating back to the GTX 900 Series of 2014 as well as, of course, the most recent cards such as the GTX series 30 offering optimal performance and in particular the 3060 TUF Gaming O12G V2 offered in this bundle.
Note of course that the more powerful a card, the more effective Reflex will be. In addition to gaining a significant (and stable!) number of frames per second (FPS) with the latest generation of Nvidia cards, your latency will be even lower and optimized with Reflex.
The benefits of Nvidia Reflex on games
As you will have understood, Nvidia Reflex is aimed in particular at FPS enthusiasts, whatever their favorite game. To date, several games directly integrate the functionality such as Warzone, Apex Legends, Fortnite or Valorant. To find out, the easiest way is to go to your game options in the video tab and see if the Nvidia Reflex Low Latency option is present. If this is not the case, don’t worry, it is always possible to activate this feature directly in the control panel of your Nvidia graphics card.
To do this, go to the 3D Settings -> Manage 3D Settings -> Low Latency Mode: Ultra
Doing so will help reduce rendering latency without being able to get a handle on all the boards. Note that you can leave the mode enabled even if your game has this device, the Low Latency Mode will automatically take the highest priority for you.
Depending on the game you are playing on, you should quickly feel the effects as you can see with the measurements taken below on games like Valorisant, Apex Legends or Warzone. In addition to offering without even activating the ultra low latency mode, the latter is natively low and we sometimes gain almost 30% in performance, which is huge!
How to measure the benefits of Nvidia Reflex on your games
Previously, testing the effects of changes on your hardware required a significant investment of time and, more importantly, money. You then had to read and compare many tests (praying that they could match the equipment you owned or wanted to acquire.
This is why Nvidia wanted to democratize and facilitate access to complete and easy-to-analyze tests of your performance. Thanks to its Nvidia Reflex Latency Analyzer functionality, it is now possible to measure the response quality of your system with the latest generation mice such as the Gladius IIIwhether wired or not.
Just want to test your GPU rendering latency? Nothing could be simpler with GeForce Experience, just bring up the performance interface by typing Alt+R. You will thus find the latency of your GPU but not the complete latency. To have the complete latency (that of your mouse and that of your screen), you need a screen with the Latency Analyzer also called Reflex monitor.
So you can perform your own tests and immediately see the difference.
Material used for the tests of this article:
- Processor : Intel Core i5-11400 (2.6 GHz) – Tray version
- CM: Asus TUF GAMING 8560-PLUS WIFI
- RAM: DDR4 Kingston Fury Beast – 16 GB (2×8 GB) 3200 MHz – CAS 16
- CG: Asus GeForce RTX 3060 TUF GAMING O12G V2 (LHR)
- Cooler: Be Quiet! Pure Rock 2 Black
- SSD : Samsung 980 500 GB
- HDDs: Seagate BarraCuda 1TB
- Case: Cooler Master MasterBox MB520 – Black
- Food: Fox Spirit US-650G – 650W
- Screen : Asus ROG Swift PG259QNR G-Sync
- Mouse : Asus ROG Gladius III