OCTOBER 2019 PCWorld 31UP TO 33 PERCENT
LOWER LATENCY
Nvidia’s Ultra-low latency response time
mode can slice up to 33 percent of latency—
the time between when you click your mouse
to the response on the screen—by enabling
“just in time frame scheduling.”
If that sounds familiar to you, it should,
because AMD touted its low-latency mode at
E3 with its Radeon 5700 series of cards. Lest
you give any credit to AMD though, the snark
in Nvidia’s blog post announcing the feature
made it clear the company’s calling firsts.
“The Nvidia Control Panel has—for over
10 years—enabled GeForce gamers to adjust
the ‘Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames,’ the
number of frames buffered in the render
queue,” the blog post said (go.pcworld.
com/gmbl). “By reducing the number of
frames in the render queue, new frames are
sent to your GPU sooner, reducing latency
and improving responsiveness.”
Nvidia said the ultra low latency mode has
three settings. The Off setting sets the game
engine to queue 1 to 3 frames for maximum
render throughput (and more latency). The
On setting limits the pre-rendered frames to 1,
which Nvidia said is the equivalent of running
“Max_Prerendered_Frames = 1” on older
drivers. The last setting is Ultra, which spits
the frame out to the GPU “just in time” for the
render to begin.
The company said the mode is most
effective at times when the game is GPU-
bound, and frame rates are hovering
between 60 fps and 100 fps. The modeNvidia has added a few features to cut latency by as much as 33 percent.