Nvidia announced Reflex 2 technology at CES 2025, which reduces latency in games by up to 75%. It combines Reflex Low Latency mode with a new Frame Warp solution: game frames are updated according to the latest mouse commands immediately before being sent to the display.
Image source: nvidia.com
Each player’s action in the game passes through a complex pipeline, at each stage of which the amount of delay increases. Commands from the keyboard and mouse are sent to the game, where the central processor calculates the results of these actions. These results are queued for rendering, which is then sent to the GPU. Only after this the image is displayed on the monitor. As a result, each frame goes through this process in a few tens of milliseconds. However, latency can increase due to stuttering and other factors, making the game feel like it’s not responding well to commands.
Nvidia’s Reflex technology, released in 2020, was designed to streamline this pipeline – from receiving mouse commands to displaying images on the screen. It manages the CPU more efficiently by passing tasks to the GPU later, which prevents the creation of a render queue. With Reflex 2, Nvidia took a different approach. Four years ago, its researchers showed that players aimed more effectively when frames were updated after rendering. This reduced latency by 80ms and allowed players to aim 30% faster.
For example, when a player moves the mouse to the right to aim, in a standard scenario it takes time to process this action and render a new perspective of the game camera. Nvidia Reflex 2 Frame Warp technology shifts or warps an existing frame in the same direction to display the result earlier. After a frame is rendered by the GPU, the CPU calculates the camera position of the next frame based on the last command from the mouse or other controller. Frame Warp takes the new camera position data and warps the newly drawn frame to reflect the most current mouse command.
When you shift pixels using Frame Warp, there may be gaps in the image where the camera reveals new areas of the scene. To address these gaps, Nvidia has developed an optimized predictive rendering algorithm. It uses camera, color, and depth data from previous frames to fill in missing areas. As a result, the player sees a frame with an updated camera perspective, the delay is reduced, and the accuracy and efficiency of actions increases.
In the shooter The Finals, the latency on the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 without the Reflex setting at maximum 4K settings is 56 ms. With active Reflex Low Latency it is reduced by more than half – to 27 ms. When using Reflex 2 Frame Warp, latency is reduced by another 50% to 14 ms. This brings the total reduction to 75%. The first generation Reflex Low Latency technology is especially effective when the bottleneck of the system is the video card. The new Reflex 2 with Frame Warp increases the efficiency of both the CPU and GPU.
For example, in the CPU-intensive game Valorant, where the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card achieves 800 frames per second, Reflex 2 Frame Warp reduced latency to 3 ms.
Nvidia Reflex 2 technology will soon be available on GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards for The Finals and Valorant. Support for other GeForce RTX video cards is expected in future updates.