NVIDIA Reflex 2 is a new feature of the company’s recently announced GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs, and it promises to bring down latency in your games by rather significantly large amounts.
During the NVIDIA keynote at CES 2025 on the evening of January 6, CEO Jensen Huang kicked off the show by treating viewers to an impressive tech demo. The demo was a brief clip of what sorts of things NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs will be capable of. All thanks to the new feature list, which of course, includes NVIDIA Reflex 2. The original NVIDIA Reflex has been a game-changing feature for NVIDIA’s latest graphics cards. Helping to reduce latency and smooth out gameplay.
NVIDIA Reflext 2 promises to improve on that, with NVIDIA claiming that latency reduction will be up to 75% from native. That… is a huge performance boost. The magic behind this is what NVIDIA is calling Frame Warp. In short, this reduces your camera latency to show the input action from the player much faster than without it.
How the NVIDIA Reflex 2 feature works
To understand how this feature works, it’s important to first understand what happens normally. To put it as simply as possible, when you press an input on your mouse or controller, that input action has to go through a series of steps before it can be displayed on-screen. Each of those steps will add some latency to the visual representation of your action.
“Inputs from your keyboard and mouse are passed to the game, where their effects are calculated by the CPU. The results are placed in a render queue, which is passed to the GPU for rendering, before finally being output to the display,” NVIDIA says. What NVIDIA Reflex 2 with Frame Warp does is use the CPU to calculate the camera position’s next frame in this series of steps. NVIDIA says it does this by using the most recent input from the mouse or controller.
This in effect, speeds up the GPU rendering process of the action being displayed. So your input is essentially “warping” to the end position quicker. It sounds technical, and it is. What’s important is that NVIDIA has come up with a way to reduce input latency. And that’s good for gamers.
Frame Warp “warps” the frame as late as possible to ensure accuracy
Another big part of how this works, or more precisely how it works accurately, is by warping the frame that’s been calculated by the CPU as late as possible. NVIDIA says this ensures that the most recent input is being reflected on-screen. The end goal here is to help players improve their aim because there’s not as much latency with their actions. NVIDIA also says this whole process can be happening “hundreds of times per second” depending on the frame rate.
So you’re always getting the most recent camera perspective as you issue more inputs. While this all sounds impressive, you’ll need one of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 50-Series GPUs to take advantage of it initially. The good news is that NVIDIA confirms Reflex 2 will support others down the line eventually.
