- Nvidia’s Reflex 2 reveal packed a nugget of info about the RTX 5090
- Team Green shared that the flagship GPU can run Valorant at 800+ fps
- The graphics card does this with an input lag of under 3ms, too
Among Nvidia’s cluster of CES 2025 revelations, including new RTX 5000 graphics cards, there were several nuggets that hugged the GPU ground, flying under the proverbial radar. One of those was neural texture compression which we discussed earlier (it sounds superb), and another was a quick footnote from Team Green in the unveiling of Reflex 2 – and it shows just how fast the RTX 5090 is in Valorant, a popular esports shooter.
Actually, you might have missed the reveal of Reflex 2 itself, which is the sequel to the original Nvidia Reflex tech that’s designed to reduce input lag (mitigating the lag that DLSS Frame Generation, and now DLSS 4’s Multi Frame Generation, hits the gamer with).
Nvidia explored Reflex 2 at length in a blog post, the gist of which is that it now offers an up to 75% reduction in latency (compared to 50% on average for the predecessor technology). It does this by augmenting the low latency mode with a new ‘frame warp’ feature.
TweakTown noticed that later in this post, Nvidia brings up a couple of examples of the latency reduction achieved with Reflex 2, and one of the games highlighted is Valorant.
Here’s what Nvidia tells us: “In Riot Games’ Valorant, a CPU-bottlenecked game that runs blazingly fast, at 800+ fps on the new GeForce RTX 5090, PC latency averages under 3ms using Reflex 2 Frame Warp – one of the lowest latency figures we’ve measured in a first-person shooter.”
So, in a top-end gaming PC (presumably) with an RTX 5090, the graphics card pushes Valorant over 800 frames per second, and does so with an input latency of under 3ms, which is super-speedy.
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Analysis: How high do you need to go?
Isn’t 800 fps a crazy figure? Well, yeah, it is. That’s partly because Valorant is an undemanding game designed for esports and silky frame rates, which even a rusty old PC can make a decent fist of running. Also, super-high frame rates are generally only chased by pro gamers willing to fork out for a ludicrously expensive gaming PC anyway (the RTX 5090 certainly comes laden with an appropriately weighty price tag).
Indeed, 800 fps far exceeds even the best gaming monitor’s refresh rate among existing models – and even outdoes the ridiculous still-to-be-released 750Hz model (Koorui G7) that popped up at CES 2025.
However, when Nvidia says Valorant exceeds 800 fps, that’s a peak frame rate, not an average – and often it will be below the average (by definition). So, it’s not quite as silly as it sounds (but even a peak of 800 fps is still, naturally enough, massive overkill for most folks).
Interestingly, PC gamers have already shown off Valorant running at jaw-dropping frame rates in the past – actually 1,000 fps plus, in spikes – but that’s on The Range (practice map), and we’re assuming Nvidia’s testing was fully in-game here. Furthermore, seemingly a more recent update has made it more difficult to obtain high fps in Valorant, too (for some players, at least as far as we can tell from reports).
At any rate, what you really need for the ultimate in smoothness is for any given game to never drop below an absolute low frame rate of the maximum speed in Hertz of your high refresh rate monitor, in an ideal situation. Again, though, this is pipe dream stuff for all but the wealthiest PC enthusiasts out there.
