Announced at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, NVIDIA’s Reflex technology has received a major upgrade. The company’s Reflex 2 takes things up a few notches thanks to some software wizardry. The final result? Promises to further reduce game lag by up to 75%. In this case, latency refers to the time it takes for the game to display reactions from the player’s input.
Here’s how it works, and it’s pretty wild. Reflex 2 combines the existing low-latency mode with something called frame warp. This technique forces the CPU to calculate the position of the next frame while the current frame is being rendered by the GPU. The CPU uses player input, usually via the mouse, to calculate the next camera position.
The tool then samples the next camera position and transplants it to the current frame, waiting until “the last moment to ensure that the latest input is visible on the screen.” This glimpse into the near future should “allow players to improve enemy targeting and tracking.”
But how can a pre-rendered image exist on top of the current frame without introducing any kind of visual inaccuracies? We have developed a “Latency Optimized Predictive Rendering Algorithm” that fills the obvious gap using: This will cause the player to see a new frame with an updated camera position without the weird hole. Literally, it’s about distorting the frame (hence the name).
The company showed off the technology in Embark Studio’s The Finals, one of the first games to support this toolset. The proof is in the pudding. When running the game at max settings at 4K on an RTX 5070 GPU, the latency was 56ms. The first iteration of Reflex reduced latency to 27ms, while Reflex 2 brings latency down to 14ms.
NVIDIA says that in addition to The Finals, Valorant will also soon support this technology. The company says it uses Reflex 2 and Frame Warp to reduce latency to an average of less than 3ms. Reflex 2 debuts as part of the upcoming GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, with support for other RTX GPUs expected in the future.
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