An update to OverwatchNvida’s Public Test Region (PTR) is bringing Nvida’s latency reduction technology, called Reflex, to the popular eSports title (via Engadget). The technology aims to help reduce the amount of time between the click of the mouse and the moment when you see the resulting action on the screen, making the game more responsive. The fact that it’s coming Overwatch was announced in January, but is now available to players who can access the PTR and who have the latest Nvidia drivers.
If you still can’t get your hands on one of Nvidia’s latest graphics cards, there’s still hope that you can try Reflex out for yourself at Overwatch – the technology was announced along with the video cards of the 30 series, but works on cards that date back to the GTX 900 series.
Nvidia has an incredibly in-depth explainer on how the technology works, but the overview at the surface level is that the game will work with your GPU to ensure that frames are made “just-in-time” to be displayed on your monitor, therefore, theoretically, you should always see the latest information.
It is important to note that latency can have some meanings, especially when it comes to online games. Reflex is not designed to help improve your network latency, so if you have a bad internet connection, it probably won’t help improve your gaming experience much.
Whether the difference in latency will be noticeable will depend a lot on the type of equipment you are using, how much better it is and how attentive you are. Still, if you are one of the testers, it is probably worth activating it to test it and see if you notice the improvement. For everyone else, it is something we should try in a future update.
AMD also has a feature designed to reduce input latency on its video cards, called Radeon Anti-Lag, which can also be enabled for Overwatch.