NVIDIA’s Reflex 2 predicts milliseconds into the way forward for aggressive video games

NVIDIA’s Reflex know-how simply received an enormous improve, as introduced at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. The corporate’s Reflex 2 kicks issues up a number of notches, due to some software program wizardry. The top consequence? A promise to additional scale back gaming latency by as much as 75 p.c. On this case, latency refers to how rapidly a sport shows the response from a participant's inputs.

Right here’s the way it works, and it’s fairly wild. Reflex 2 combines the pre-existing Low Latency mode with one thing known as Body Warp. This tech duties the CPU to calculate the place of the subsequent body as the present body is being rendered by the GPU. The CPU makes use of participant enter, sometimes through mouse, to calculate the upcoming digicam place.

The instruments then pattern the upcoming digicam place and graft it onto the present body, ready till the “final second to make sure the most recent enter is proven on display screen.” This glimpse into the close to future ought to “permit gamers to enhance their intention and monitoring of enemies.”

However how can a pre-rendered picture exist on prime of the present body with out creating every kind of visible inaccuracies? NVIDIA developed a “latency-optimized predictive rendering algorithm” that makes use of knowledge from prior frames to fill in any apparent gaps, so gamers will see a brand new body with the up to date digicam place with none bizarre holes. It’s, fairly actually, warping the body (thus the identify.)

The corporate showcased this know-how with Embark Studio’s The Finals, which shall be one of many first video games to assist the toolset. The proof is within the pudding. With the sport working on an RTX 5070 GPU at 4K with max settings, the latency was 56ms. The primary iteration of Reflex lowered the latency to 27ms, whereas Reflex 2 dropped all of it the way in which all the way down to 14ms.

Along with The Finals, NVIDIA says that Valorant will quickly assist the tech. The corporate notes that it has used Reflex 2 with Body Warp to cut back the latency to a mean of beneath 3ms. Reflex 2 will debut as a part of the forthcoming GeForce RTX 50 sequence GPUs, with assist for different RTX GPUs coming someday sooner or later.

This text initially appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/computer/nvidias-reflex-2-predicts-milliseconds-into-the-future-of-competitive-games-182213650.html?src=rss