An update to Overwatch’s Public Test Region (PTR) is bringing Nvida’s latency-reduction tech, called Reflex, to the popular esports title (via Engadget). The tech aims to help reduce the amount of time between when you click your mouse, and when you see the resulting action on screen, making the game feel more responsive. The fact that it’s coming to Overwatch was announced back in January, but it’s now available to players who can access the PTR, and who have the latest Nvidia drivers.
If you haven’t been able to get your hands on one of Nvidia’s latest graphics cards, there’s still hope that you’ll be able to try Reflex out for yourself in Overwatch — the tech was announced alongside the 30-series graphics cards, but works on cards going back to the GTX 900-series.
Nvidia has an incredibly in-depth explainer on how the tech works, but the very surface-level overview is that the game will work with your GPU to make sure that frames are made “just-in-time” to be shown on your monitor, so you should theoretically always be seeing the latest information.
It’s worth noting that latency can have a few meanings, especially when it comes to online games. Reflex isn’t designed to help improve your network latency, so if you’ve got a bad internet connection it probably won’t help improve your gaming experience all that much.
Whether the difference in latency will be noticeable will depend a lot on the type of equipment you’re using, how much better it is, and how eagle-eyed you are. Still, if you’re one of the testers, it’s probably worth turning it on to try it out, and seeing if you notice the improvement. For everyone else, it’s something to look forward to trying out in a future update.
AMD also has a feature meant to reduce input latency on its graphics cards, called Radeon Anti-Lag, which can also be turned on for Overwatch.