In the never-ending battle against system latency, NVIDIA brought out the big guns. NVIDIA designed their Reflex technology to improve the gaming experience in GPU and CPU-bound scenarios by drastically reducing end-to-end ("mouse-to-photon") system latency. The results surpassed my wildest expectations. NVIDIA's technology not only works well, but manages to reduce system latency by up to 60% in some scenarios. Perhaps best of all, it's completely "free"—free in that it's available to anyone who owns a GeForce 9-series or newer NVIDIA graphics card, and also free in terms of hogging system resources. You'll lose only a couple of frames per second, oftentimes not even that, but are rewarded with a drastic reduction in system latency in return, which results in a snappier, more responsive gaming experience. There's only one quibble—in order to work its magic, Reflex requires a deep level of game integration, and the list of currently supported games only includes 15 titles. The good news is that many of these are popular multiplayer first-person shooters (Apex Legends, Overwatch, Call of Duty: Warzone/Black Ops Cold War/Modern Warfare, Fortnite, Valorant, Rainbow Six: Siege), where low system latencies arguably matter the most.

The essence of the NVIDIA Reflex technology is "Reflex Low Latency Mode," which is basically a driver-driven frame limiter. It kicks in whenever your graphics card can get overwhelmed by incoming data to avoid the queuing of frames waiting to be rendered. If your CPU is the bottleneck, Reflex has a solution as well: "Reflex Low Latency + Boost" mode has Reflex SDK boost GPU clocks and allows frames to be submitted to the display slightly sooner.

If your gaming rig is powerful enough to never find itself in GPU or CPU-bound scenarios, the Reflex technology won't serve any purpose simply because your system won't run into any of the issues Reflex aims to solve. This tech isn't designed for eSports professionals and multiplayer enthusiasts who game in Full HD on an RTX 3090 with the lowest graphics settings. It is, however, perfect for everyone rocking a mainstream graphics card. If that's you, the NVIDIA Reflex technology can and will improve your gaming experience.

Considering there are effectively no drawbacks to turning Reflex on, you should do exactly that whenever you see it available in the video settings of the game you're playing. An argument could be made that Reflex could have been implemented as a silent driver update and enabled by default whenever it's available without all the marketing hype surrounding it, but that's a silly and pointless discussion as NVIDIA obviously wants everyone to know about and use the technology they developed, and it could possibly factors into your buying decision, too.