Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment has teamed up with Nvidia to reduce input lag for PC gamers playing the hit battle royale game. Using Nvidia Reflex, players can accurately assess the true input lag on their PCs, taking into account latency in every possible area, from components to peripherals to the display.
The software is available for players with GeForce GPUs from the GeForce GTX 900 Series onwards, so in all likelihood, if you have an Nvidia graphics card, you’ll probably be set. Make sure you’ve downloaded the drivers and updated your game, and you’ll be good to go. According to its own report, Reflex can reduce system latency in Apex Legends by up to 30% – although the most dramatic differences will be clear on older GPUs.
GeForce esports product manager Seth Schneider explains more about Nvidia Reflex in this handy video, but we’ve summed it up for you, too. Normally, a CPU would line up frames in a ‘render queue’ to improve a game’s framerate and keep the graphics card constantly fed. However, this has a tendency to increase latency, so instead of forming a render queue, Nvidia Reflex perfectly syncs the CPU and GPU to minimise latency.
The Reflex software development kit can also be set up to display metrics so you can see how your latency is looking in-game. Much like a more complex frame rate counter in the corner of your screen, these graphs would be pretty distracting, so it’s probably best to only turn them on in practice modes. However, they are useful for helping you to optimise your setup.
What’s more, if you’re buying a new 360hz G-Sync display, it will come equipped with a Reflex Latency Analyser. Obviously this part requires a serious cash drop on new hardware, but you’ll be able to see real-time latency metrics not only for your entire system – like the Nvidia Reflex software measures – but also broken down so you can see your mouse latency as well.
Although the latest Nvidia cards seem to be out of stock just about everywhere, a few older models still make our best graphics card list, so they might be worth checking out if input lag is ruining your Apex Legends games.