In summary: Overwatch became the fourteenth game to support Nvidia Reflex, a latency reduction tool capable of halving system latency in ideal scenarios. It is now available in the public Overwatch (PTR) test region and will be added to the primary client shortly.
Nvidia Reflex is another addition to the GeForce feature set, similar to ray tracing and DLSS. Like these two features, Reflex requires support to integrate with the game engine, and is somewhat situational: in our preliminary tests last October, we found that it had the greatest impact when the game was linked to the GPU and that its effectiveness varied between games.
Nvidia claims that Overwatch is set to become one of the best implementations we’ve seen so far. In your graph (below), your test systems equipped with an RTX 2060 Super and GTX 1660 Super have their latency reduced by half, and in an RTX 3080 system the latency is reduced by two fifths.
Admittedly, few people pair a GTX 1660 Super with an Intel i9-10900K and, unless you do, your system will see less benefit than shown by the Nvidia graph. But, in practical terms, if your Internet connection is good and your monitor has a high refresh rate, you will notice and benefit from a reduction of just 10 ms.
Nvidia is also implementing a flash latency indicator on Overwatch, to improve the accuracy of its Reflex Latency Analyzer tool. As the name suggests, the latter is a software tool that evaluates the system latency by measuring the time between mouse input and a corresponding action on the screen – the activation of the flash latency indicator, which appears in the game as a small white square . Requires a compatible monitor, but it is not too difficult to set up if you have one.
But activating Reflex is even simpler. Download Overwatch Public Test Region (PTR); it will be accessible to you on the Overwatch tab in the Battle.net client if your account is active and in good standing. The switch to Reflex is in the Overwatch client, under Options, under Video settings.