- This reflex-equipped monitor
just has the tool built into it
for measuring ingame latency.
(slaps loudly)
Remember this thing?
Bam, a photosensor.
I remember.
And I also remember asking Nvidia also nicely
to release it to the public.
And while that might not be quite what we've got here today,
what we do have is a display
that has very similar functionality built right into it.
Yes my friends, this gaming monitor has a function
that will tell you the exact delay
between when you click the mouse
and the photons actually hit your eyes.
So we thought, "Wow, that's pretty cool.
"Why don't we use it then
"to see which ingame settings have the biggest impact
"on our gaming experience."
And we are also gonna see the impact
of our sponsor Storyblocks.
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(upbeat music)
An Nvidia Reflex display like our Asus PG259QNR
does exactly what I said in the intro.
It measures the latency from the click to the frame
actually reaching the display
and the muzzle flash actually going.
Critically, what it doesn't do
is measure the display's latency,
which is why we're still calling on Nvidia
to release the Eldad as well.
But before we dive in, let's go over how this works.
On the back of the display are USB ports.
Now you might think, "Oh well, this is just a USB hub
"like on the non-reflex model of this exact monitor
"that you guys checked out a while ago."
And you would be right
except that if you plug a supported mouse into it,
then plug the display's USB output into your PC
like we've done right here,
the display will recognize precisely
when the mouse button is clicked,
in theory, before the PC even receives the signal.
It then measures the time between detecting the click
and a change that it monitors onscreen.
Pretty straight forward so far.
But how do we tell the monitor where to look?
Will it just monitor the entire image
and use AI to tell something relevant changes?
I mean yeah, it's Nvidia,
so that's not even impossible to believe in the future,
but for now it's a little bit simpler.
What we do is go into the onscreen display
and then we can tell it,
"Hey, turn on the monitoring rectangle."
Now, this is already right,
but let's go ahead
and have a look at some of the other options
that are in here.
You can see, you can try a couple of the presets entered,
right-handed, left-handed
according to where you might expect your gun
or especially a muzzle flash to be.
You can change the size, make it bigger or smaller
and you can also adjust the sensitivity.
Once it's tuned, every time we pull the trigger
on our firearm or click the mouse,
we're gonna see a little millisecond readout
in the bottom corner
or if it's having trouble figuring out what it's looking at,
it'll just show a bunch of Xs.
So let's dive in
and see what our starting latency looks like here.
We are running at 640 by 480.
I mean, I guess...
Did we wanna start at a best case scenario for latency
or a worst case?
- [Anthony] Well, I guess this is pretty best case.
(man laughs)
- All right.
So what are we looking at here then?
- There's, a lot of fluctuation and that's normal.
- 21 milliseconds from click to seeing something happen.
That's insane.
- 23.
That's from click to all the processing and everything.
That's less than a frame at 60 frames per second
for something to happen onscreen.
That's ridiculous.
It doesn't sound like it's that fast, but it is.
- But it's really fast.
- If you're moving, then the different shapes
of the muzzle flash,
especially if you're like firing really rapidly,
- Yeah.
- Can cause it to misread, I think.
- All right, what do you wanna do next?
- We could bump the resolution.
- Sure, let's bump the res.
22, 16. 16.
That's like a frame at 60 Hertz, but the whole chain.
So games that have Nvidia Reflex technology
actually have in engine optimizations
to bring this time down.
But this reflex-equipped monitor
just has the tool built into it
for measuring ingame latency.
(slaps loudly)
- We also don't have ultra low latency enabled
in the driver either.
- Really?
- This is just stock settings in the driver.
Yeah.
- Okay. Yeah, let's do it.
That maximum performance.
I would not pay extra to have this feature in my monitor.
- Neither would I.
- [David] I might.
- Would you?
- Why?
You could just...
Especially...
- [David] When you're dialing in settings
for competitive games...
Yeah, I don't have one of those Linus.
- Right. That's fair.
But they should just do this for 50 bucks
and then you have something
that you can carry forward with you.
Okay.
The problem though, is that for this to work,
you actually do need to wire up a thing to your mouse.
- Okay. All right.
- Yeah, but they could just sell you a mouse for that
and then you dial it in
and then you use your regular mouse.
24 30, 37, 30 26, 24 31, 19,21, 25, 24...
These kinds of fluctuations are actually really normal.
You wouldn't normally see them or feel them.
- No, I can't feel them.
- Because all of this kind of stuff
is just happening in the background
and by the time it updates to the screen,
the screen is basically doing something else.
Your eyes are living in the past more or less.
- Your eyes are living in the past.
Anthony 2020.
- Next, we need to figure out how to minimize brain lag,
- Who throws an Incendia Grenade?
Look at me.
I got fireproof feet.
I got sandals on, bruh.
Okay. You know what?
Let's see how bad we can make it.
Not helping matters right now or rather helping them
is the fact that Counterstrike is an eSports title
and has received significant optimization in this way.
Now, you can play games
where you can really feel that there's a lot more engine lag
even if you haven't changed anything else,
your graphics card, mouse, monitor, et cetera.
I can turn off AA and see what happens.
That's always something that has been
a perceived difference for me.
Is that turning on really high levels of anti-aliasing
can make some games feel really mushy.
- Yeah.
- Hold on a second though.
Does that look like a little bit less spikiness?
- Maybe, yeah.
Looks like it's hovering between the 20 to 30 range
right now.
- 17, 29, 25...
- I don't think I've seen anything
significantly higher than 30 yet
whereas before we were spiking as high as 40-ish.
- Yeah, interesting. Okay.
Maybe anti-aliasing is still bad.
- By a few milliseconds.
- Hey look, when you want every competitive edge.
- I mean, that is Nvidia's marketing for this.
- This is almost definitely a little bit better
not to my feel,
only because I can look at the numbers, Anthony.
(Anthony laughs)
I cannot feel the difference between those.
- I was gonna say --
- No-no.
- When did you join the eSports leagues?
- Yeah exactly, right.
- We could try a lower refresh rate.
I don't know how much you care about that
considering if you're buying a 360 Hertz monitor,
are you gonna lower the refresh rate?
- No, not unless you're an idiot.
- So...
- Well, with that said,
I don't think it supports ULMB at 360 Hertz.
- Yeah.
- May not.
- It gets 240 only.
- There we go.
- It's a nice dim look for the display.
(man laughs)
Look, I'm not saying I'm a ULMB hater, David,
I'm just saying it's worse and you should feel bad.
- It's all about DyAC, bro.
- If you're in a dim room, a dim display doesn't matter.
- That may be true, but I try to not be
my old gamer handle, closet gamer.
I put my whole computer and monitor in my closet.
Okay.
So let's have a looky loo here.
Oh yeah, it's worse.
- Yeah, that is worse.
- It's definitely worse.
You are officially objectively worse, David.
(man laughs)
- Yeah, did good, scrub.
- Yeah, not that I would wanna play you, but whatever.
66. I mean, we never saw anything even close to that.
Lower Hertz, definitely more worse.
Okay. Confirmed.
What's our next project?
- That's actually crazy given that it's 240 versus 360.
360 only just became a thing.
- I know right?
- Right? - Big difference.
- Does somehow. - I'm selling my monitors.
- Oh, I know you're getting one of these.
I'm going on the record right now.
If a 480 Hertz monitor doesn't come out in the next year,
David will own a 360 Hertz monitor.
Now, let's play around
with a title that actually has Nvidia Reflex.
So Nvidia Reflex, low latency.
We're going to on plus boost.
- [Anthony] I have no idea what that does.
- Okay.
Let's just go on.
Let's go vanilla on.
And we're not gonna use deep leaning, super sampling,
we're just going to run that low
and then we're going to try cranking it to high.
Fortnight.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Fortnight. How about that one?
Disgraceful.
I could probably write a better search than this.
- [David] DOS is better.
- Fun fact, speaking of DOS,
I actually set up an emulator for a Pentium I 200 Megahertz
with MMX.
The reason for it is I brought home the Hot Wheels PC
and I was like, "Oh this sucks, doesn't it?"
And my kids were like, "These games are great."
Oh, okay. Yeah.
I guess content is still king.
By the way stay subscribed
'cause maybe we'll do a video about that emulated old PC
versus using DOS Box versus just getting old hardware.
Anthony's wanted to do something like that for a long time.
- DOS gaming build, constantly on the back burner,
still on my shelf.
- This is a great chair
because if I have to go to the bathroom,
I don't even have to move.
- [David] Except you have pants on.
- Except that. I can fix that.
(David laughs)
- [David] I didn't ask for that.
- [Anthony] Lttstore.com.
- Lttstore.com. Pin point 8 milliseconds.
And look at the consistency.
That's the more impressive thing.
- This isn't really changing at all.
- We're going from 13 to 15 or 11.
That's within two or three milliseconds.
- This is nuts.
- Turn on either reflex plus boost or turn off low latency
and see what happens.
- All right.
Let's try reflex plus boost.
Okay. This seems very similar.
- Yeah, it might be maybe a little bit more consistent.
It seems to more favor the 12 and a half, 13.
- I don't know.
- That may be placebo.
- I think that's the kind of thing
where if you can tell the difference, you're an idiot.
(man laughs)
- Yeah, it's pretty placebo.
I think at this high frame rate,
we're probably not going to notice a difference.
- Well, it's why would CS go so much slower?
So you're saying Fortnite was just already very optimized
and all Nvidia's done is add some branding to it?
- It's probably that it actually just makes more sense
at lower frame rate.
- Right, that's fair.
- Okay. So let's turn RTX on.
That really does look a lot better.
- And that's with all the other graphics settings on low.
- Yeah, I know right.
You could make the argument...
I mean textures, I would wanna turn my texture quality up,
but other than that,
you could probably make the argument
for just turning on ray tracing,
cranking almost everything else down
and just enjoying that...
Look at that soft lighting on his jacket.
That looks crazy good.
That looks like the shade.
- And with a more cartoony game like this,
the flatter look for textures and stuff
actually it looks fine.
- Yeah.
Whoa, that is way worse.
I guess we're only at 200 FPS now
so I guess that would be why,
but turning ray tracing on
ain't gonna give you a competitive advantage,
that's for sure, bud.
- It's still consistent though.
And that's probably the most important thing.
- I dunno.
I would take 10 milliseconds over ray tracing.
- Would you take 10 milliseconds
over a more stable response time?
- No, but it was pretty stable at 10 milliseconds --
- It was stable before.
This game seems ridiculously stable.
- Yeah.
- Try with RTX plus reflex, see what that looks like.
It might make up the difference.
- Okay, there we go.
Oh wow, it did actually make up for a lot of it.
- Yeah, it's not quite where it was,
but it's quite a bit better.
- Yeah, that's pretty cool.
This experience with the product
really doesn't make it any easier to recommend
for or against it though.
On the one hand,
it's a 50 to 100 dollar adder on your monitor
that doesn't affect performance at all
except that it can help you tune the performance
of your system.
(beeps loudly)
- Well, hold on guys.
You're not even gonna to talk about the coolest part?
Come on.
The latest beta for GeForce experience
gives you a whole bunch of performance metrics to gawk at.
Check it out.
Not only does it show you GPU performance stats
and let you adjust power targets on the fly,
it also integrates directly
with the Nvidia Reflex latency analyzer
built into the display.
Here's how it works.
Up top, we've got two stats
that everyone should be able to get
regardless of the display.
Render present latency is how long it takes a frame
to get from being rendered to being sent to the display
while render latency is how long it takes
to actually render the frame.
Now, if we turn on latency monitoring in our monitor's OSD
and wait a couple seconds,
bam check that out.
Even more good stuff.
This is a list of all the latency information
that the monitor is collecting.
We've got the exact location of the monitoring rectangle.
We've got the system plus display latency,
same as what the monitors OSD shows us.
And if we've got a compatible mouse
like this ROG Chakram,
we've got mouse click and total system latency,
which is nearly as accurate if not just as accurate
as Eldad.
What does it mean for a mouse
to be compatible with the reflux latency analyzer?
Two things.
A validation database and firmware.
Nvidia's compiling a list of average click latencies
for existing mice in order to make
as many of them compatible as possible.
But some mice are able to capture
the exact moment a click is registered in firmware
and transmit it to the display on each click.
Nvidia's launching with support
for the 30 most popular eSports mice on prosettings.net
with per click latency reporting
supported on the ROG Chakram, on the ROG Chakram Core,
Razer DeathAdder Pro and Steel Series Rival 3.
So if you don't have one of the supported mice,
then you still get
the GeForce experience performance overlay stats
just without mouse latency added in.
To get accurate results at home,
you'll need to make sure that you got
at least 20 samples of data like 20 clicks
and try to find a dark background
where a change in brightness will show up well,
muzzle flashes like that
and anything else that's instant when you click,
should do nicely.
And that's it.
Back to our regularly scheduled Linus.
(beeps loudly)
- I still prefer it as a standalone thing
that you could carry forward with you to future monitors
rather than built into it,
but I think the value of it
from just a tuning and optimizing perspective
is definitely there.
- Yeah, I think it would actually make a lot more sense
if you, as the center of your ring of friends,
decide to kirk your monitor around
and straight up optimize each one of their machines --
- Right. - For a little profit.
That might actually...
- Or you could just be a good friend
(Anthony laughs)
and help that center person buy it
so they don't have to use any money.
- Okay. You've got an eSports team.
You've got a bunch of these monitors,
but you only wanna spend the extra money on one.
- Yeah, that makes sense.
- So you go through
and you set up all the different machines
and they all have the same settings
and you're good to go.
- Or one person buys this monitor,
post the results on Reddit
and then everyone just uses those same settings.
- Yeah.
- Hey, there it is. All right.
So one of you go ahead and buy it.
The rest of you,
just get the one without the extra modular nonsense.
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