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NVIDIA's Reflex 2 predicts milliseconds into the future of competitive games

NVIDIA’s Reflex technology just got a massive upgrade, as announced at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. The company’s Reflex 2 kicks things up several notches, thanks to some software wizardry. The end result? A promise to further reduce gaming latency by up to 75 percent. In this case, latency refers to how quickly a game displays the reaction from a player's inputs.<br /> Here’s how it works, and it’s pretty wild. Reflex 2 combines the pre-existing Low Latency mode with something called Frame Warp. This tech tasks the CPU to calculate the position of the next frame as the current frame is being rendered by the GPU. The CPU uses player input, typically via mouse, to calculate the upcoming camera position.<br /> <br /> The tools then sample the upcoming camera position and graft it onto the current frame, waiting until the “very last moment to ensure the latest input is shown on screen.” This glimpse into the near future should “allow players to improve their aim and tracking of enemies.”<br /> But how can a pre-rendered image exist on top of the current frame without creating all kinds of visual inaccuracies? NVIDIA developed a “latency-optimized predictive rendering algorithm” that uses data from prior frames to fill in any obvious gaps, so players will see a new frame with the updated camera position without any weird holes. It is, quite literally, warping the frame (thus the name.)<br /> <br /> The company showcased this technology with Embark Studio’s The Finals, which will be one of the first games to support the toolset. The proof is in the pudding. With the game running on an RTX 5070 GPU at 4K with max settings, the latency was 56ms. The first iteration of Reflex reduced the latency to 27ms, while Reflex 2 dropped it all the way down to 14ms.<br /> In addition to The Finals, NVIDIA says that Valorant will soon support the tech. The company notes that it has used Reflex 2 with Frame Warp to reduce the latency to an average of under 3ms. Reflex 2 will debut as part of the forthcoming GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs, with support for other RTX GPUs coming sometime in the future.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/nvidias-reflex-2-predicts-milliseconds-into-the-future-of-competitive-games-182213650.html?src=rss