Ever since Counter-Strike 2 was released in September, players have been working to adjust their settings to get the best results. CS2 is a higher spec game and is slightly more demanding on PC hardware than its predecessor. That’s where NVIDIA Reflex comes in. We got the chance to talk with Guillermo Siman, Senior Product Manager at NVIDIA about his insights into NVIDIA Reflex, GTech and its influence on Counter Strike 2.

Guillermo recently graduated with his master’s degree from MIT and began work for NVIDIA in August 2023. His role as a product manager for esports technology involves enhancing the competitive gamer experience. CS2 was his very first go to market project but it’s certainly not his first time in the world of Counter-Strike.

NVIDIA Esports Product Line Up

When it comes to designing a product for esports players, the team at NVIDIA had their work cut out for them.

“I think there’s a few components, right? So there’s obviously first the graphics cards. And then there’s a whole suite of technology that’s tailored for competitive gamers. So examples of that include NVIDIA Reflex or G Sync technology and ultra low motion blur, which is particularly effective for esports titles.”

One of the most unique parts of the development is the relationship NVIDIA has built with Valve over the last few years.

“We’ve been working very closely with Valve to make sure that the driver is as optimized as it can be for CS2. So this goes back to February or March. So we got a bunch of questions about, well, what’s the driver that’s targeted for CS2? We’ve seen that our newer cards are doing fantastic at their target resolutions.”

The relationship involves a lot of collaboration and communication to ensure that Reflex does what it’s designed to do. Through this, NVIDIA have had significant success and seen games reduce latency by up to 70% on Reflex.

How to Use NVIDIA Reflex for Counter-Strike 2

If you have the best NVIDIA settings set up already, we’d still recommend ensuring NVIDIA Reflex is enabled. Even small reductions in latency

“Frames win games. We have an entire research team that’s dedicated to eSports research in understanding how frames impact games, and I’m talking about gameplay performance, not system performance in how latency impacts games.”

To maximize your hardware’s performance with NVIDIA Reflex, you don’t even need to download any additional software. You can turn it on in Counter-Strike 2 by simply following these steps:

Open the game
Go to ‘Settings’
Navigate to ‘Video’
Navigate to ‘Advanced Video’
Set ‘NVIDIA Reflex Low Latency’ to “Enabled”

Read next: How to Use NVIDIA GeForce on Chromebook

How NVIDIA Reflex Works

NVIDIA Reflex is a technology designed to mitigate local system latency. Latency is essentially the time it takes for an input to register and then that input appearing on your screen.

For instance, your mouse might add latency. There are some mice that add 20 milliseconds latency and some only add one millisecond. Your input has to be processed by the game, and then it has to be rendered by the GPU.

To use Guillermo’s metaphor, imagine that you’re watching a duo of artists that they’re working on video game art. One is a sketcher. This is a CPU. The other is a painter. This is the GPU. Once the CPU sketches a frame, the GPU must generate it.

Sometimes the CPU is working much faster than the GPU. This can create a stack of sketches waiting to be painted. This is called the render queue. In the game world, if the process is too slow, you might be seeing something that happened a while ago.

To fix this, the painter suggests a new approach and instead of working from a pile, they make each frame together. So NVIDIA Reflex simply gets rid of the render queue and significantly reduces the latency.