PC World - USA (2021-02)

86 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2021

REVIEWS TESTED: NVIDIA REFLEX

Nvidia Reflex on or off. To put these numbers

in greater context, they’re roughly twice as

fast as the 20ms latency mark considered the

competitive esports gold standard. If your

game refreshes at 60 frames per second, that

works out to a new frame every 13.3ms.

These results are faster than that. Damn.

I’d expect there to be more effect if the

resolution were boosted to 1440p or 4K,

where the GPU comes more into play, but this

is a 1080p panel. I was hoping to be able to

use Nvidia’s Dynamic Super Resolution

feature to increase the render output to 4K,

but Nvidia’s experts warned me that doing so

wouldn’t create wholly accurate metrics, due

to the slight overhead that DSR imparts. Alas.

REFRESH RATES AND

VISUAL SETTINGS IMPACT

But we can test more stuff. Those Fortnite and

Valorant metrics were taken on a blistering

360Hz panel. Latency improves with higher

refresh rates. Most people have a 60Hz

display. How does using that more common

refresh rate affect Reflex’s capabilities? We

locked the Asus ROG Swift PG259QNR’s

refresh rate to 60Hz using Nvidia Control

Panel to find out. (We consulted with Nvidia

to confirm that doing so wouldn’t affect the

Reflex Latency Analyzer’s reliability.)

There are a handful of takeaways here.

First, note how much less responsive these

games become moving from a 360Hz to a

60Hz panel—there’s a marked downgrade

across the board compared to previous

results. (We’ll dive into that more later.) Reflex

continues to help significantly for the GTX

1660 in Fortnite, as well as the RTX 3080 with

ray tracing enabled. Valorant’s responsiveness

remains largely unaffected with Reflex active

at 1080p.

Let’s keep that train of thought choo-

chooing. We also tested Fortnite andValorant

with the monitor locked at 60Hz, 144Hz, and

360Hz refresh rates to illustrate the advantage

Fortnite, DX12, Epic

Preset, 60Hz Refresh Rate

Average PC+ Display latency (milliseconds)

RTX 3080RTX On, Reflex On

RTX 3080RTX On, Reflex Off

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

63.6

99.1

48.4

47.2

30.1

50.2

Valorant, High Visual

Settings, 60Hz Refresh Rate

Average PC+ Display latency (milliseconds)

RTX 3080Reflex On

RTX 3080Reflex Off

GTX 1660Reflex On

GTX 1660Reflex Off

SHORTER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

16.5

16.5

18.4

19.6