New Nvidia driver update reduces latency

In the world of high-end gaming graphics cards, discussions of landmarks such as frame rate, resolution, and sharpness are dominant. But a new driver update for Nvidia cards also includes a significant improvement that could help reduce the latency between when a player enters his entry and when he sees the results on the screen. This is made possible by the new ultra-low latency mode that Nvidia adds as an option in its software control panel via the update of a Game Ready driver today.

For a decade, Nvidia's graphics drivers have tried to put one to three additional video frames on hold in advance (depending on user settings). This means that once the next image is ready, the GPU might use the "idle" time if not to start processing future images.

This queuing of images helped smooth out rates in cases where the system was temporarily overloaded for one reason or another, letting the GPU filter an image while the system was catching up. But this smoothing of the frame rate also added extra latency, as the system basically operated from slightly obsolete entries for a few frames.

With today's update, Nvidia allows users to reduce this setting to zero in the new Ultra-Low Latency mode. This means that images are generated "just in time" based on the latest available inputs, which reduces latency as much as possible (but leaves no room for error regarding the maintenance of a rate of regular weft.

Nvidia tests in popular games running at 60 fps revealed an average graphical latency reduced from 6 to 11 ms (20% to 33%) with the Ultra-Low Latency mode. This is not the kind of reduction that players can necessarily perceive at the naked eye, but even this small change could improve the "feel" of responsiveness in the most challenging games. Nvidia said GPU-related games running at 60 to 100 frames per second would have the biggest impact of this change.

Nvidia's Ultra-low Latency mode comes a few months after AMD began offering similar functionality, called Anti-Lag, on its RX 7700 series cards (Nvidia's Ultra-low Latency mode is launched in beta version for "all GPUs"). Both features are integrated directly into DirectX 9 and 11; DirectX 12 games already provide developers with more direct control over the timing of image queuing.

The latest Nvidia update also offers improvements in linear scaling (mainly for low-resolution pixel art games), enhanced image quality filters, and support for the new 30-bit color mode on the whole range of Nvidia products. You can download the driver directly here or through the GeForce Experience application.