And it helped when it was just me and one other player left standing: in a game of fine margins like Fortnite, every little advantage helps, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the millisecond advantages Reflex gave me could well have swung that final dual in my favor. If my noble opponent had been a split second quicker on the draw, it could have been my head exploding like an overripe watermelon instead of theirs. I then went on to win a second time, albeit with just the 11 kills this time: still, a KDA of 27 is something I will brag about for some time to come.

Flush with victory I turned to Call of Duty: Warzone, which, alas, brought me back down to Earth with a thud. I got a couple of kills where Reflex likely gave me the edge, but it would be an exaggeration to say it went “well.”

That said, I can definitely credit Reflex with an assist in the Gulag where you go after you’ve died for the first time in a match. There, you’re paired off against another downed fighter in a one-on-one fight for a chance to re-join the game, and when I managed to win those, Reflex certainly played its part, allowing me to get my shots out the second I saw my enemy’s face.

While Reflex has been enabled for all GeForce cards from the GTX 900 and up, it works best on the latest RTX 30-series hardware. “The absolute latency is even lower with the higher-end GPUs,” Schneider confirms. “As frame rates increase, the penalty you get from queuing is less,” he explains. In other words, the improvement you get in lower-end cards may be a bigger percentage improvement, but that’s because it’s starting from higher latency levels. The RTX 30 series remains the pro gold standard, both for graphical fidelity and ultra-low latency.

Of course, reduced latency isn’t just for aspiring professionals. “I’ve played a bunch of Elden Ring lately and even though there is a large amount of animation delay in that game, the timings that you need to be able to roll dodge effectively requires lower latency,” Schneider says. “Latency’s important for everything.”