Basics • GPUs • Graphics • Monitors • Practice • Reviews

NVIDIA Reflex and NVIDIA Boost in practice test: Skill enhancer or marketing – What remains of the promise?

23. March 2021 06:30

Summary

Another gimmick from Nvidia works flawlessly. Nvidia Reflex and Boost also makes it possible for gaming beginners to reduce latency in the GPU limit. No specialist knowledge necessary! A feature that costs nothing and is retroactively compatible up to Maxwell (Nvidia 900 series). Although the list of games supported so far is very manageable, it will grow. See DLSS and Raytracing! A reduction in latency of more than 30%, without my own hands on it, that was really impressive. Praise and recognition to Nvidia!

I can recommend the LDAT measuring system without hesitation. As we have all seen, LDAT is capable. It measures exactly what it is supposed to measure. Whether one or the other likes the results, that is not up to LDAT. Again, a salute to the critics. LDAT doesn’t care what kind of graphics card you use. LDAT only measures the end-to-end latency! What exactly a CPU or GPU limit is, I could hopefully explain a bit clear and you should take with you: If you drive with 99% GPU load, your latencies will increase! This is exactly where Nvidia comes in with Reflex and Boost to reduce latencies and without a massive FPS drop.

To use Nvidia Reflex and Boost, no separate hardware is required. That’s what I wanted to leave you with. A 900 series Nvidia or younger will do!

Conclusion

The replacement for the so called adjusteritis at the in-game frame limiter is here. Nvidia presents us Reflex and Boost. At this point, a claim from me on how Nvidia managed to do this. As you all have already noticed, Nvidia Reflex and Boost is an in-game option. If you know a little about frametimes, stutter and tearing, you know what’s coming next. Play smoothly and without distortion with low latency? It does involve a bit of work! G-Sync or Freesync alone is not enough.

Keyword: Framerate Limiter! Nvidia Reflex and Boost most likely work the same way, as does the manually set frame rate. I’m still looking at that in detail though and will measure the latency with Framelimiter. I didn’t have time to do that now. I don’t mean to denigrate the performance of Nvidia and the game developers with this. On the contrary! If it can get the desired result instantly with a click of the mouse in the menu, then I’m more than happy to forgo hours of messing around with the in-game frame limiter or RTSS. Does a gamer need Nvidia Reflex? My opinion on this: definitely! Whether you’re an e-Sports gamer or a Tripple-A single player gamer.

The RTX 3080 has brute performance and outperforms my RX 5700 XT by a long shot, but that was clearly to be expected. For me personally it was an awesome experience, once RTX on! and DLSS itself. Here Nvidia has fully convinced me. And: this is definitely addictive! Sad that the RTX 3080 can’t stay with me, because it comes from Igor’s fund. I’m glad that such a “unicorn” once got lost in my PCIe slot. When it’s gone again, it’s RX 5700 XT, yeah…

Ok, AMD has its own features like anti-lag and boost. Whether the functions really bring what AMD advertises? That’s what we have to find out! Be interesting to see who comes up with the better implementation here, wouldn’t it? Headline: Nvidia Reflex + Boost vs. AMD Anti-Lag + Boost. A question for the community: should I take a look at this too? Then I scrounge a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti and a roughly equally fast Radeon RX 6700XT from Igor’s stash and play the game again.

Spoiler

Finally, a spoiler. What’s next? We dispel the rumor that adaptive sync degrades latency! We also compare G-Sync with Freesync in terms of latencies. Then we also take another look at what V-Sync does. And of course, we also test what effect manually limiting the framerate in the CPU or GPU Limit has on the latency. Framerate Limiter vs. Nvidia Reflex! My hypothesis: Framerate limiter and Nvidia Reflex deliver approximately the same result. We’ll see if I’m right. See you in the forum and until the next article!

Pages: