During the presentation dedicated to the NVIDIA RTX 30 range, we not only saw the new range of graphics cards, but the presentation of a new technology called Reflex, which is optimized for competitive gaming and eSports. What does it consist of? Can we gain performance on our PC?
NVIDIA presented together with the G-SYNC 360 Hz monitors a technology that combines hardware and software in order to achieve the lowest latency in games under the name NVIDIA Reflex .
Keep in mind that what NVIDIA’s G-SYNC technology does is synchronize the refresh time of the monitor and the number of frames per second that the graphics processor writes in the image buffer and then be sent to the screen. G-SYNC, thanks to making the graph control the refresh rate of the screen, it avoids undesirable effects such as ghosting, tearing and other artifacts due to the lack of synchronization between both components.
Therefore, NVIDIA Reflex is an upgrade over NVIDIA’s G-SYNC technology and will be available only on a limited selection of G-SYNC monitors and other peripherals when it is released.
What is NVIDIA Reflex?
The first part of the technology that makes up NVIDIA Reflex is a set of software APIs that game studios can use to add the “Low Latency Reflex Mode” setting to their games. What this set of APIs do is reduce the number of frames that the GPU queues for certain scenes, this also reduces the load on the CPU.
Huang’s give as an example of NVIDIA Reflex performance a system with a GTX 1660, from which they claim that we can expect an improvement of 33% when we play games that support this feature.
The other part of Reflex technology is the hardware, which comes in the form of a latency analyzer chip. This small processor will be integrated both in the 360 HZ monitors with G-SYNC that will appear on the market from companies such as Acer and Alienware, as well as in mice from ASUS, Logitech, Razer and SteelSeries.
What the latency analyzer does is measure the reaction time with the mouse or the time it takes for the image buffer to be transmitted to the screen in order to have a clear image of all the elements that add latency and have the lowest possible.
Thanks to this combination of hardware and software, very low refresh rates can be obtained that give a huge advantage in eSports.
What NVIDIA graphics does it support?
At the moment we do not know it, but given the information we have, the thing would be limited to the lack of final information from NVIDIA in its RTX 30 × 0, RTX 20 × 0 and GTX 16 × 0 ranges. In addition, developers have to add to the optimization, so for now there are only a few games that will be able to enjoy this system, such as Apex Legends, Call of Duty WarZone, Destiny 2, Fortnite and Valorant.
It is foreseeable that with the launch of new games they will already implement the improvements to support NVIDIA Reflex, so we will have to be attentive to the growing list of titles.
