Luckily for everyone, the YouTuber Battle (non) sense posted a video in which he put the two technologies side by side to see how they actually work, and in this article, we’re going to build on the data collected for them. analyze and refine them.
How does Reflex and Radeon Boost work to reduce latency?
Latency on a PC can be reduced with two methods: the first and most obvious is to increase the number of frames displayed per second, and the second method is to optimize the data pipeline between CPU and GPU.
AMD’s Radeon Boost uses the first method to improve frame rate. This tool intelligently reduces game resolution but only when there is movement, with the aim of increasing the frame rate to a very high level and thus providing lower input latency. If during the game you are still and do not move the mouse, the resolution will return to its predetermined state, so that in the end this decrease in resolution is practically “not noticeable”.
NVIDIA Reflex technology, for its part, works by improving the communication between CPU and GPU to reduce latency. And here’s why most sites will tell you that Reflex is better than Radeon Boost: In a traditional video game and without active latency boosters like Reflex or Radeon Boost, the CPU will send images to the GPU as quickly as possible, which is normal. and that’s something we want.
However, if the GPU becomes “CPU bound” (i.e. its usage is basically at maximum), the GPU will not be able to process the frames as fast as the CPU is feeding them, causing the one of the dreaded neck. In this case, the bottleneck would be in the pipeline where the frame buffer is queued with frames that the GPU needs to work on later, resulting in increased latency.
NVIDIA Reflex technology solves this problem by avoiding this bottleneck in the data pipeline as much as possible. Instead, the game engine will only send frames to GPU when it is ready to accept a new frame from the CPU, keeping latency to a minimum. In other words, this technology avoids creating a frame buffer for GPU processing… it eliminates the bottleneck, yes, but it can impact performance.
Additionally, NVIDIA and AMD offer two additional low latency modes aside from Reflex and Radeon Boost: NVIDIA Low Latency mode and AMD’s Radeon Anti-Lag. Basically, these technologies also try to deliver the same as Radeon Boost and Reflex, but they only do so at the pilot level. The advantage is that you can apply these technologies to any video game you want, but the disadvantage is that it is less efficient because the game engine is not involved; NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Radon Boost require game developers to implement the technology in their graphics engine.
Frame rate limits
The low latency modes don’t stop there; You might be surprised to read this, but limiting the frame rate can be an effective way to reduce input lag.
This method works like Reflex in that it optimizes the CPU-GPU pipeline to reduce latency. When the frame rate is limited, GPU usage decreases and bottlenecks are eliminated, as easy as that. This lightens the CPU-to-GPU pipeline, allowing the GPU to process frames as fast as the CPU fed them because the CPU is also limited by this frame rate limit.
Now the question is, which of these five low latency boosters works the best?
In the first test of the aforementioned video, a frame rate limit was tested against NVIDIA’s low latency mode (not Reflex), and surprisingly, this led the speed limit to outperform the NVIDIA solution at the level. of the pilot.
The situation changes, however, after the switch to NVIDIA’s Reflex technology; NVIDIA’s low latency technology is comparable or even slightly better than the frame limit, delivering excellent low latency numbers without the need to limit FPS.
The YouTuber also tested AMD’s Anti-Lag technology face-to-face against NVIDIA’s Low Latency Mode and found that they performed on par, so the next step was to see what happened when NVIDIA technologies Reflex were opposed to Radeon. will see the results are indisputable: Reflex far outperforms AMD Boost technology in a significant amount.
This test shows us that the optimized pipeline method to reduce latency is the most reliable way to reduce it effectively. AMD’s solution collapses as the GPU is still bottlenecked and forced to handle the queued frames in the buffer; it’s actually even worse, as the resolution is constantly changing, resulting in inconsistent performance in the game.
It should be mentioned that AMD’s Boost technology is not at all stable in the games it is supported in, such as Apex Legends or Fortnite. For example, in the latter case, the game would freeze after turning 90 times, and the Boost implementation in Apex Legends is completely inconsistent, causing lag spikes that make the game unplayable.
Conclusion: NVIDIA Reflex is much better than Radeon Boost
Through Battle (non) sense, we learned that optimizing the pipeline between CPU and GPU is the most efficient way to reduce latency compared to simply reducing resolution or increasing frequency. frames per second.
In this regard, NVIDIA Reflex technology wins many integers, is more consistent and robust, and ultimately performs much better. AMD still has a lot of work to do on its Radeon Boost technology to make it something to consider.
