FEBRUARY 2021 PCWorld 77responsiveness
improvements,
as you’ll see in
our benchmarks
section.
Technically,
the Nvidia Reflex
SDK works by
zeroing out the
render queue,
allowing the
game engine to
tell the CPU to
submit render
work to the GPU
just-in-time. That keeps your game from
feeling sluggish. Because the CPU isn’t under
stress to supply a render queue, it can keep
an eye out for mouse clicks until the last
possible second, too.
We witnessed Reflex’s increased click
responsiveness when playing Valorant at
60Hz on a GeForce GTX 1660 with visual
settings cranked. With Reflex active, our
mouse delivered a blistering 0.5-millisecond
response time across 100 clicks, comprised of
mostly 0.4ms and 0.5ms clicks. With Reflex
disabled, it averaged 0.6ms, with mostly
0.6ms and 0.7ms clicks. That’s the most
noticeable example, but across the board, we
witnessed slightly better mouse latency with
Reflex on. This particular benefit might be a
bit hidden with the mouse we used for
testing, though, as the Asus ROG Chakram
Core (go.pcworld.com/chak) is ludicrously
fast. Most mice take several milliseconds to
register a click, but this one averages 0.5ms.
Hot damn.
Nvidia supplements Reflex with an
optional “Boost” feature that you can choose
to enable. Boost, appropriately, keeps your
GPU boost clocks higher so that frames hit
your display faster. That may help Reflex
provide a benefit even if you’re already
playing with low visual settings. In games, the
Nvidia Reflex menu setting has three options:
Off, On, and On + Boost. Because activating
Boost doesn’t have any drawbacks aside from
a higher power draw, there’s no reason to
leave it disabled if you’re using Reflex.
Nvidia Reflex only just rolled out, but
we’re already seeing games add it in. You can
use Nvidia Reflex in Fortnite, Valorant, ApexYou need to activate the various Nvidia Reflex features in the visual options of
games that support it, like Fortnite.