PC World - USA (2021-02)

FEBRUARY 2021 PCWorld 85

Reflex, you can have your cake and eat it too,

at least to some degree.

Reflex doesn’t deliver such sterling results

if you aren’t GPU-bound, however. With ray

tracing turned off, the staggeringly powerful

GeForce RTX 3080 becomes identically

responsive with Reflex on or off.

Stepping down to the much more

common GTX 1660 reveals Reflex’s ongoing

utility. That graphics card is nowhere near as

powerful as the RTX 3080, and it can become

GPU-bottlenecked at 1080p even with ray

tracing disabled using the Epic visual preset.

Turning Nvidia Reflex on significantly reduces

latency with the GTX 1660 once again,

bringing us down into the roughly

20-millisecond range considered optimal for

competitive esports.

Riot’s Valorant has taken the world by

storm, and it’s an incredibly well-optimized

game. Even with visual settings maxed out at

1080p, Valorant remains incredibly

responsive regardless of whether you have

Fortnite, DX12,

Epic Visual Preset

Average PC+ Display latency (milliseconds)

RTX 3080RTX On, Reflex On

RTX 3080RTX On, Reflex Off

SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

35.3

72.4

Fortnite, DX12,

Epic Visual Preset

Average PC+ Display latency (milliseconds)

RTX 3080RTX Off, Reflex On

RTX 3080RTX Off, Reflex Off

GTX 1660RTX Off, Reflex On

GTX 1660RTX Off, Reflex Off

SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

21.8

21.8

23.1

44.7

Valorant, High

Visual Settings

Average PC+ Display latency (milliseconds)

RTX 3080Reflex On

RTX 3080Reflex Off

GTX 1660Reflex On

GTX 1660Reflex Off

SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

11

11.2

12.9

11.8

DLSS makes your graphics card sweat even at
1080p. First, let’s take a look at how Nvidia
Reflex can help with responsiveness.
With the RTX 3080, using ray tracing to
move the bottleneck from the CPU to the
GPU can severely affect latency, but activating
Nvidia Reflex claws back much of the pain.
Flipping on Reflex results in a whopping
fifty-plus percent latency improvement with
RTX on, and it’s a difference you can truly feel
in the game. That’s great news if you like
playing with all the eye candy on, or prefer to
use a higher 1440p or 4K resolution, which
are more likely to become GPU-bound. With