84 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2021REVIEWS TESTED: NVIDIA REFLEX
The Asus ROG Chakram Core.with Nvidia Reflex + Boost enabled.
We hooked two mice up to the system:
The Reflex-capable Asus ROG Chakram Core
was plugged into the G-Sync module to
measure mouse latency, and we put tape over
the sensor to keep it from moving during
testing. A secondary mouse was used for
navigation to the testing spots. We set up
repeatable testing scenarios in custom
matches for each game, clicked the left
mouse button to trigger an action, then
waited for the animation to reset completely
before doing it again. We did that 20 times,
jotted down the average Mouse, PC +
Display, and System Latency results, then
repeated the process four more times. Each
result below is the average of 100 clicks, in
other words.
We kept an eye on the monitor’s real-timelatency metrics throughout the process. If any
given click resulted in an abnormally high
latency far outside of the norm, we stopped
the measurements and restarted the 20-click
process over. Variables in the game, like
Fortnite’s day/night cycle or Counter-Strike’s
random chickens, can introduce small, but
noticeable variations in latency results if you
aren’t careful.
The numbers below show results from
the PC + Display measurement. Part of Reflex
Latency Analyzer’s appeal lies in its mouse
metrics and the overall system latency
metrics those help provide, which isn’t easily
measurable with other means, but they’re
not especially helpful unless you have
multiple mice to compare against each
other. Our Asus ROG Chakram Core
averaged a face-melting 0.5 millisecond
latency time pretty much across the board,
and in the two tests where it averaged
higher, it only bumped up to 0.6ms. The real
latency changes across our benchmarks
occurred in the PC + Display measurement,
so that’s what we’re focusing on.NVIDIA REFLEX LATENCY
BENCHMARKS
Let’s start with Fortnite. Epic worked closely
with Nvidia around the RTX 3080 launch, and
Fortnite now supports the full Reflex SDK as
well as real-time ray tracing and DLSS. The
Nvidia Reflex SDK works best in GPU-bound
scenarios, and activating ray tracing without