Overwatch players with Nvidia graphics cards got some welcome news today: experimental support for Nvidia Reflex was added to the Public Test Region (PTR) that allows players to test new features before they’re added to the game proper.
Nvidia Reflex debuted in September 2020 in an effort “to optimize every aspect of the rendering pipeline for latency using a combination of SDKs and driver optimizations,” the company said, and give its customers an in-game advantage.
Riot Games and Epic Games quickly added Nvidia Reflex support to Valorant and Fortnite, respectively, and other developers have followed suit. Popular titles such as Call of Duty: Warzone, Apex Legends, and Rainbow Six: Siege all support the technology.
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Not all Nvidia Reflex support is created equal, however, and its performance improvements can vary quite a bit based on the system in question as well as the level of support a developer chooses to add to a specific title. It’s not simply a switch to flip.
It’s not clear to what extent Blizzard chose to support Nvidia Reflex in Overwatch. However, Nvidia claims the feature can offer up to a 50% reduction in system latency for the title, but it didn’t share more specific details about the technology’s implementation.
Those details were also missing from Nvidia’s collection of Nvidia Reflex-compatible games, mice, and monitors; it’s nothing but “TBD” across the entire row. More information will probably become available as the technology leaves the PTR.
Blizzard did say in its patch notes that it’s also testing support for the Nvidia Reflex Latency Analyzer, which is supposed to improve input latency measurements, but that feature requires a compatible mouse and monitor as well as an Nvidia GPU.
Nvidia said that Nvidia Reflex can be enabled in the Overwatch PTR by going to Options and then Video settings. The feature should start to reduce system latency right away. Hopefully it makes it that much easier to click on some heads.
