Competitive gaming, especially first-person shooters, often comes down to tenths of a second. This singular moment can be the difference between landing a critical headshot or taking one yourself. Nvidia wants to ensure that eSports professionals and hardcore enthusiasts get every possible benefit – and that’s where Reflex comes in. The Nvidia Reflex improves gamer performance by attempting to keep system latency to a minimum.
Nvidia (which, fun fact, is derived from the Latin word for “crave”) released Reflex in 2020. It’s become one of the best features of the company’s GPUs, but many gamers still aren’t sure exactly what it does, how it works, and how to enable it. This is because Reflex prevents the CPU from sending frames to the GPU when the GPU is not ready to render them, meaning that the delay between when you enter a command and the resulting frames are rendered is reduced. Reflex is enabled on a game-by-game basis, and typically you can enable the setting under a game’s Graphics or Video tab, titled Nvidia Reflex Low Latency (turn it on or Enable + Boost).
Let’s take a closer look at what happens when you enable NVIDIA Reflex
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Reflex is distinct from network latency, which is the time between when an event occurs in an online game and when it is reported on your screen. This may lag due to the speed (or lack thereof) of your network connection (or other players’ connection).
The main way Nvidia tackles input latency is by eliminating something called render queuing. A render queue is where user commands processed by the CPU are stored until they can be executed by the GPU. The problem is that a render queue can cause render latency, where frames pile up faster than the GPU can handle them, potentially causing input lag.
By keeping the rendering pipeline more synchronized, Reflex allows inputs to be sampled closer to when the image is actually rendered, reducing latency. If you want to test Reflex yourself, you’ll need two things: an Nvidia GPU (GTX 900 series or later) and a supported title. Fortunately, the list of Reflex compatible titles is now very long.
