NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency - How It Works & Why You Want To Use It 

Nice to see nvidia took notice of your work

This guy literally pushed NVidia to make proper drivers. Incredible!

I greatly appreciate you specifying what is required to use this feature. That was not mentioned anywhere easily accessible in the promotional materials. Good to know my current monitor and GPU setup will support it, if the game developer adds this feature to their game.

Really appreciate the work you've done. Helps me understand this very well. Cheers!

One reason I can think of that you may want both the limiter and the Reflex mode on at the same time is if you want to keep power consumption/fan noise low and never tear on your G-Sync display (FPS limit), but there are areas in the game where you become GPU limited and drop below the framerate limit. In those areas you would want to keep the latency low (Reflex) and not let the game start to build up that render queue.

As soon as I heard about Reflex I was looking forward to your tests.

I think consistency is way more important than low-latency. While I agree with your methodology and you guys did a great job with Reflex Mode, you overlooked consistency of mouse movements. When I turn on Reflex Mode, I can notice a huge difference when I try to flick to a target. My flicks never go where they're supposed to. They always end up slightly too short or too far. I played for a couple of months with reflex mode on before I realized this inconsistency was happening. Once I turned Reflex Mode off, I instantly felt the difference. My flicks were way more consistent. Now if I miss, it's because I messed up or the enemy suddenly strafed the other direction, not because my cursor ended up in a different spot than it should have. This is ultimately the problem with Reflex Mode and why you shouldn't use it. I would suggest putting the mouse on a track or something and measuring mouse movement versus character rotation. I predict that you will find a huge discrepancy when Reflex Mode is enabled. Here you would get a much more important metric than just latency. Character rotation is way more important than low-latency clicks. Not knocking your findings so far, you did a great job, keep it up.

Dude... amazing stuff. It's awesome that 1.) you had the will to do all the testing and 2.) Nvidia didn't just try to shut you down, but actually listened and made what seems to be a great leap forward. What a crazy year this is

We really appreciate your work Chris. It's amazing NVIDIA is taking notes and improving drivers for all of us thanks to your work and analysis done in the past.

I wish you had tested with G-Sync on and off...

Appreciate the testing but,, many gamers that care about 10ms-20ms of input latency are also going to be running competitive(low) settings at framerates 144fps+. Input latency reductions are much larger when comparing 60 to 120fps, but 60 vs 70fps is small to begin with. You _are_ showing a 22ms latency reduction from freeing up the render queue which is VERY helpful, but the FPS-related latency reduction is only 7ms at best since you're comparing only a 12fps difference, if you had been running low settings at *actual* high framerates the latency reductions or diminishing returns would be very interesting to see.

Thanks for the tests! I really want to see the tests comparing InGame "FPS limiter" vs "Nvidia FPS limiter" with "NVIDIA Reflex" enabled, pls! I would also very much like to see how "NVIDIA Reflex" affects the frame time stability in the scenario of the InGame "FPS limiter" and "Nvidia FPS limiter".

Wow this was good. Thanks man I was waiting for this one!

Hey Chris. 1- Thanks for the video; 2- You should test this with G-Sync to see how well it gets along with Reflex, more specifically, frame-capping the game to a monitor's native refresh rate with Reflex on and G-Sync enabled. Here's why this is THE biggest thing in PC gaming ever, and why Nvidia should be focusing on it instead of RTX and Ray tracing bullshit. There always have been some compromises made in PC gaming because every component (CPU, GPU, monitor) was doing their own thing, not to mention higher level problems, such as games with locked framerates. The rise of competitive gaming put the nail in the coffin of this last one, adaptive sync tied the GPU and monitor, but the CPU was still off the hook. Until now. The days of frame-pushing are numbered, along with the cons of frame-capping. This is the first time ever we can call PC gaming efficient. In theory, no component does more work than it needs to, which lowers power consumption and heat output, and yet it still retains all the benefits of low input lag, low delay to show a rendered frame on the monitor, and no tearing. This is it, guys, that breakthrough you hope it happens someday, kind of like what it felt to experience Pascal's performance. If Microsoft adds this to DX12 and/or Reflex/G-Sync works flawlessly on Linux, I feel like I can die in peace.

This is the exact video I wanted to watch when searching about nvidia low latency. I have noticed that "Boost" can create some glitch in scenarios, as I'm running 720p, 60hz. I am not sure what "Boost" does over the ON. I have seen great performance around 250-300fps with Nvidia Low Latency=ON (no boost). Like the latency is so much reduced for us potato gamers, so it helps us compete the 120Hz gamers. There's only internet-delay that could give any "technical" damage at this point, but most of the time all of the players are hovering over 30ms (In most of my games), and rarely someone's getting 20ms. Given that, I'm 100% in favor of ALWAYS turning N-latency ON, in-game if present. If your GPU getting jetty, then instead lower the resolution and other graphical settings. I have read somewhere in comments, that Boost is only giving performance improvements on 2K or 4K monitors.

Regarding 2:06 , when using Vulkan there is a render queue presentation mode VK_PRESENT_MODE_MAILBOX_KHR which avoids that old frames pile up in the queue. Basically this mode replaces old (not yet used) frames in the queue with fresh frames which should avoid input lag. So you could still have a queue of size 3 to avoid stuttering while also avoiding sending outdated frames to the GPU at the same time.

Do the test in a game running at 144/240 FPS. The people who care about system latency plat at these frame rates.

Thank you for great test and explanations. it's all clear now. While it might not be useful for me, it's good to be up-to-date with modern tech :) Reflex is a good thing. Looks like they made a full circle: introduced render que some old time ago to make some things smoother, and now are not using que again to achieve lower latency. Well done :)

With an RTX 3090, this guide is golden. 4K 72Hz monitor and some titles just had insane latency that felt horrible while others did not. Using reflex and ULL where possible and a 69Hz FPS cap for everything else just works... everything is smooth. It feels more or less the same as my 165Hz panel despite the lower frame rates, because the system and render latency end up more or less the same... not much outside of Esports titles on low settings can maintain 160FPS without ever dipping.

4:12 - the information i was looking for a while :D. thanks and cheers!

nVidia and Battlenonsense is a tech industry love story UWU Happy to see that the latency tool is accurate and making your life easier!

Hopefully games will start to use this now cause its going to be a config nightmare until then. In Fortnite simply use Reflex, but in other games we have to still use frame rate limiter and for those high fps games where we are gpu bound low latency mode needs to be enabled.

OMG I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that NVIDIA listens to Battle(non)sense. This is the only channel I trust.

Amazing work as always. After watching this I read the news article from NVIDIA introducing Reflex and in the first paragraph they give all of this research credit to their "NVIDIA Research Scientists" and give no mention of you or other community contributors. I think you definitely deserved a sponsorship or at least a mention in their blog post. Regardless, you haven't gone unappreciated by the REAL gaming hardware enthusiasts for your hard work.

LOVE IT! Much support from Österreich :)

this has been super valuable research for every pc gamer, thank you so much!!!!

This is really cool tech, but I have come to appreciate the consistency of gaming at a locked frame rate. I think even with this technology enabled, 200 fps will still feel significantly different than 120 fps, so I think I'll stick to capping fps for now. Nice video man!

Your are awesome!!! Watching your videos for years now and I always know that these vids help me understand more behind the scenes of gaming. I increased my knowledge... thanks a lot!!!

excellent work on analysing the issue from the beginning and for making these videos. it makes it easier for everyone else to make the right choices :)

You are the best at what you do man. You achieve such incredible production value in every video you upload. You should be proud!

Thank you. I had just rewatched your video from last year after I did a clean install of windows and was setting my system back up.

Watching your videos over and over again every month is amazing to remind myself about these things and know what to do to properly config my competitive games ♥️♥️♥️ The most usefull and interesting content that really matters for me on youtube. Keep it up because I really miss you when you stop doing videos for long time

That's an incredibly excellent video ! Thx a lot for that serious work.

Danny: this is kinda made for Battlenonsense Someone from Nvidia: yea it kinda is lol

This is all info Nvidia should have given us. Thank you for your work!

Thanks Chris! I will actually try to get the reflex SDK in for my project, now that I saw your results.

your videos are perfect for someone like me who has thousand of other obligation but still would like some nice monitor or mice when i have free time to play and i do not have to do day long research on the thing, thank you from an ship navigation officer.

Insane video, so much credit due for the work in this video! Thanks for helping me understand! Absolute legend!

Great work as always Chris! Looking forward to more of your content with various hardware configurations, settings (low/high) and games!

Thank you for this outstanding clear explanation. Was a surprise to discover than a frame limiter lowered latency that much

Keep up the good work Chris!!

I really want to see a comparison between Reflex ON and Reflex On+Boost! Would love to see it tested in Valorant, between different specs!

I dont understand any topic before watching your videos but they are so damn good that I learn easy

Was waiting for this video, good job!

Great video as always, appreciate how you educate the community! And exciting to hear how your working with Nvidia on some things, congrats!

Thats awsome! All we need now is more games supporting this and a simillar feature for radeon users or something open-source. Even single player games would benefit from this, everything is better the lower the latency!

Super nice video! :) And nice that you mentioned Blizzard and Overwatch! :)

I'm actually very happy there's a quicker way for you to perform your tests now! I'm also very happy with the fact Nvidia is supporting this on the 900 series onwards. I saw that being announced and immediately thought about your video on GPU Load and was sure it had something to do with it, and was also sure it would a feature exclusive to 3000 series, but here we are. I didn't plan to buy any RTX 3000 GPU as my 1070ti is serving me very well, but that low latency thing made me reconsider, since I thought I wouldn't have it. I'm actually loosing my "nvidia is greedy" superstition a little bit...

Great video man. Keep up the good work!

Those ultra low latency mode results are interesting. Means I keep it off as I'm usually CPU bound.

Insane.. I remember times when removing Screen Tear was the most crazy shit ever.. But this is just next level another one on top

I feel this should be done on a Driver Level, Now we have to hope Game Developers actually use the feature.

So, the best latency settings I see would be this if you are gpu bound 1:FPS: uncap 2:Reflex low latency: on+boost if game supports. Will override control panel low latency when available 3:g-sync and v-sync off 4:If reflex isn't available in a game, setting a fps cap would be wiser while using control panel Low latency (I think. correct me if wrong) I'm gonna test how much of a change I see when using g-sync with a monitor that supports it. For g-sync has come a long way now and has improved I was always told to run g-sync and v-sync in control panel but v-sync off in game. This may have changed since g-sync already helps screen tearing but I also have a 1070 so I usually never go past 144hz

This guy is so smart that I'm so lost as to what I need to do. Lol can you just tell me what settings I should do?

I cant fathom why you dont have milions of subscribers yet...

The things I like about this channel is, he using poor man graphic card and not some high end where most of us cant afford.

That's just quality content! Which tools are you using to make your footage? Your recordings looks so smooth and the graphics are so well done, too!

Overwatch has dropped the feature in the PTR...looking forwards to the tests!

Very informative, thanks. I use vsync on and cap the frame to 59.9 and triple buffering on and I dont notice any delays. So maybe you may want to cap frame rate to 59.9 and keep triple buffering on. Keep up the good work

Please produce more testing with other games and graphics cards! This is great information

was waiting for this one. couldn't figure out wtf reflex was based on what nvidia said

Driver nvidia low latency is still important. On games with Vsync on, setting it to on at least reduces the pre rendered frames to 1 which reduces input lag on vsync on games, noticed especially with resident evil 6.

Incredible work. You got nvidia to create this awesome technology from your testing

Awesome video again Chris! But I'm really sad that game developer need to implement this feature because that means older games like BF4 or BF3 will not get it T__T

I'm impressed by how scientific you are in your testing. Thank you for doing the work. I know this takes time and greatly appreciate you. You deserve a much larger following!

Thank you so much for this video i can't wait for more tests and mostly for the new cod cw.

What if i want a framelimiter because of gsync + vsync 3-4 fps below max refreshrate ( ingame or rtss ) + reflex low latency?

Have you Test the NEW Windows 10 Grafik Option Settings - Display - Default Graphics setting - Hardware Accelerated GPU scheduling on / off ?

When Nvidia released the latency tool my mind gravitated towards Battle(non)sense :) Funny how that came to be afterwards.

So basically it's gsync for your system. Dynamic framerate scaling... Very impressive! 👍😊

There is digital foundry and then there is battle nonsense. Good stuff man

Thank you for your time to analyse all that. I would like to know what is latency when you don't use gsync on because i like ULMB. And what is latency when you turn on Vsync + ULMB and reflex?

Do you still recommend having Low Latency Mode Off vs On?

Keep up the good work mate you are doing an ace job

I wonder how apex will be affected? I was following your work for almost 3 years now and the delay on that game (following your data) is much more delayed than others of course we need to forget the network delay (Still work to be done) but hope you will do a test on that game when it comes to system delay when reflex is enabled? Great content as always keep up the great work. Thanks........

It's really funny how younger people and corporations find this stuff "new" when it's been this way since the early 90s haha, many people just couldn't be bothered to go and optimize their systems and settings for low latency when they didn't even notice the delays. Where as those who cared and noticed already have this stuff minimized for decades. Setup a framerate limiter as close to the game engine as possible, done, never let FPS go below that limiter or have more than 80-90% CPU or GPU load. Half of the "new" settings are literally renaming old driver settings to a non technical term that they can market... Ultra low latency = pre-rendered frames 0 aka JIT rendering, low latency on = pre-rendered frames 1 aka what everyone sensible has been using for decades, Reflex Boost = prefer maximum performance aka what everyone sensible has been using for decades. Unfortunately the only thing they added was reducing latency in GPU limited scenarios, which is something that shouldn't exist in competitive games, there should be spare CPU and GPU performance and never be limited other than by an FPS/processing limiter in software. prerendered frames 0/JIT/Ultra is good for Vsync gaming aka the few non competitive games that only run well with Vsync. What I would like to see is a test that is done in the same software/game, not different games for each test. And include all scenarios, GPU un+limited, CPU un+limited, Vsync ON/OFF, fps limiter ingame ON/OFF, Reflex ON/OFF, but of course this blows up the number of tests and size of the data table to show. The current method makes it hard to compare and always misses some useful use cases. Currently it looks like Reflex does almost nothing better latency wise compared to an FPS limiter set to the same FPS value, plus who the hell runs no FPS limiter these days when most monitors have Async, no one should, nor should they run GPU limited, and that makes Reflex obsolete in GPU unlimited scenarios. And games like say Metro/Control/... RTX etc. that do run easily GPU limited do not support Reflex... Where as GPU light online games that do not run GPU limited support Reflex... they really got it backwards at Nvidia in terms of useful support just so they can market it easier to masses in these silly kiddie games.

THis is a paper worth research and effort fitted in a video. Thank you very much.

Excellent vidéo and results!

What we need is rock solid stable frame-times not fps and the latency for controls should be calculated in a different thread than the main thread in games. That's how you make games' control and experience feel smooth af. AMD already has something similar to this for like 2 years now it's called Anti-lag.

best content on the subjet i wish you keep making some more videos

I know manually counting frames is a time consuming process. You’re a smart dude who seems like they know their way around a computer. Why haven’t you automated it? I use MATLAB for toy programs like this. Just look for a large change in luma in the region where the LED is in the frame for t1 and a large change in luma in the region where the gun is for t2.

Thank you for the phenomenal video! That was an impressive, elegantly simple explanation.

I noticed, using Vsync in the control panel with either NULL or Reflex or both that there are some games that will lock the fps from 144 to 138 even without a framerate limiter. And there doesn't seem to be any input lag difference. So, why is that only in some games (Both were DirectX11) and not in others. And why only when Vsync is activated via control panel + NULL or Reflex?

I'm noticing every streamer / pro with an NVIDIA graphics card runs Counterstrike 2 without Reflex enabled. Could you test the latency in that game to see if the pros are paranoid or correct?

Good information, glad I found this!

So technically this should be set to off if you have a gpu that is anything under 99% usage unless you are playing cod or something? Does it do anything to controllers?

From your previous videos you've recommended the FPS-Capper from RTSS = Consistent frametime, Ingame FPS Cap = Less input lag. How is the frametime spacing with just the Reflex Low latency and no FPS cap?

so what is better? 1) rtss=on at max hz-3, freesync/gsync on, vsync off 2)just nvidia relfex on 3)rtss=on at max hz-3, freesync/gsync on, vsync off and nvidia reflex on.

The thing I'd really like to see is how this affects latency with g-sync on/off with fps limiters below, at, and above the refresh rate of the monitor.

Great work man

This is amazing, great video!

This is a great upgrade from Nvidia..hope all multiplayer games can use this

You should had test in valorant and high fps scenarios.

Well, I wouldn't consider it progress to get NVIDIA to push yet another proprietary technology out to developers. There is a Vulkan extension in the pipline (VK_EXT_present_timing) which is a multi-vendor effort to expose the presentation engine's display details and better allow scheduling a present to happen at a specific time.

Your wish is granted! Overwatch reflex support came out today

I would love to see this in an MMO like WoW where the framerate is all over the place. For instance i get 140fps all alone somewhere, 80-90fps in a city and 60fps maybe in a full raid with a million spell effects.

awesome video! im guessing playing with g-sync will have latency the same as vsync disabled then?

Great video! I've tried to explain the significance of Reflex to a friend but he didn't understand. Just like bufferbloat, there seems to be a general lack of awareness of the render queue and how it affects system latency. My hope is that Microsoft will add something like Reflex to DirectX itself so that all games can take advantage of it. There's one thing I wanted to clarify however. You said we are not GPU-bound when we use v-sync. That's actually not true, as the CPU still has to wait for the GPU to release a backbuffer. The only difference is that every frame has to wait in the swap chain until it's scanned out to the display. As a result, both the render queue and the swap chain get filled and latency skyrockets. It would be nice if Reflex could target the vertical blanking interval so we can have low latency without screen tearing.

@Battle(non)sense, can you confirm or deny if using a second monitor during testing affects the results?

In the most recent driver revisions I see that with a G-sync/G-sync compatible display and G-sync enabled within the nvidia control panel, enabling V-Sync along with Reflex in game sets a frame rate limit below your monitors refresh rate (158fps on a 165hz g-sync display). I can only confirm this on a 30 series GPU. Do you have any confirmation that this does not add any additional input lag?