Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed we all know alongside the release of AMD's brand new na'vi GPUs the company rolled out two new features in their Radeon drivers suite last week I looked at one of those features Radeon image sharpening and today I'm back to do an in-depth analysis of the second and that's Radeon anti-lag the basic goal of Radeon anti-lag is to reduce input lag while gaming input lag is the delay between when you make an input like a mouse click or key press and when the action takes place on your display for fast-paced competitive games especially shooters like csgo over what or fortnight it's key to have the lowest possible input lag so you can spot your enemies target them with your weapon and shoot them as quickly and smoothly as possible input lag is a combination of many factors some involve your peripheral hardware like your monitor mouse and keyboard some involve how fast your CPU and GPU are at processing frames but Radeon anti lag is primarily focused with reducing lag in the driver stage and I think AMD do a great job of explaining how it works in more detail so I'll quote them here games produce frames of animation by pairing work done on the CPU with work done on the GPU the CPU begins its work first and it feeds work to the GPU as it works its way through a frame in most use cases the GPU workload is the primary performance constraint we call this a GPU limited scenario in such scenarios games perform the CPU work at least one frame ahead of the GPU work resulting in two frames of latency in total the delay between the click of the mouse register during the CPU work for the frame and the response on the screen produced by the GPU can expand to cover the time required for the GPU to process two full frames or more at 60fps that delay is 33.3 milliseconds two frames at sixteen point seven milliseconds each or more in such cases Radeon anti-lag dynamically improves the pacing of the CPU work allowing the CPU work to overlap a significant portion of the GPU work so the CPU doesn't get too far ahead of the GPU as a result Radeon anti-lag can in theory shrink input lag by almost a full frame nearly sixteen point seven milliseconds at 60 fps restoring responsiveness to you again the impact is quicker response times and a more direct connection between your actions and the results shown on screen so that's basically the gist of it radio an anti-glare can reduce input lag by up to a full frame according to AMD when mostly GPU limited and we'll get into the implications of this when we put up some beautiful blue graphs for now there's a few other things to talk about one is that Radian anti-lag works on any recent AMD GPU or AP so not just new navi gps however it only works in DirectX 11 titles unless you have an RV GPU in which case it also works for DirectX 9 no AMD GPU supports this technology in DirectX 12 Vulcan or OpenGL a lot of popular competitive games have dx11 modes that's not necessarily a bad thing but naturally as more games begin to use new api's ready an anti lag will need to evolve to also support them there are three ways to enable anti-lag one is via the game profile settings another is via Radeon overlay and that's the method I'm most commonly used and the last is via the alt L global shortcut in all three cases it's just a simple toggle and gets to work right away even in game for testing I decided to measure the entire clip to response input lag using the same testing tools as for my monitor review so this is a photo detector placed on the screen as well as a mouse input both hooked up directly to an oscilloscope using this method we can record the precise time we ask a game to do something like shoot a weapon and then the precise time this action is shown on the screen we expect radio and antenna to have the lowest response time numbers over a 20 sample average for each test the hardware for testing is also fast for the GPU I've used ambe's new Radeon rx 5700 XT paired with Intel's Core I $9.99 hundred K which remains the fastest CPU for gaming I've then used the fastest display I have on hand pic series brand new px5 Hayabusa there are reviews coming on that soon which is a 1080p 240 Hertz display with 0.6 millisecond response times so let's start the testing here with Rainbow six siege as you can see I've tested three different modes we've got vsync on facing off and freesync on with both Radeon aunty lag enabled and disabled doing input lag testing takes a lot of time so I'm not going to go into a heap of games but the ones I do have including Rainbow six siege should cover most bases this is a game that generally has very low input latency part of this is because it runs extremely well I was pushing above 200 FPS in my testing with that much sweat and high frame rates have a significant impact in reducing input latency so across the board here we're pretty much in that 17 to 22 milliseconds of input latency zone which is lightning-quick Radeon anti-lag did produce consistently faster results for two of the three test conditions for vsync off were shaved off 2.3 milliseconds and for free sync we shaved off about 2 milliseconds there was no difference for vsync on gaming not that would recommend using vsync for any input lag sensitive games given the game was running at around 220 fps in this testing it seems ready auntie lag shaved off around half of frames worth of latency with each frame lasting 4.5 milliseconds at this framerate now a 2.3 millisecond reduction or 13% improvement to input latency doesn't sound all that impressive but there's a few things to keep in mind AMD did say that we can expect up to around a single frame of latency improvement however given we are gaming at such a high frame rate to begin with that one frame isn't actually all that much latency ambi also said anti-lag works best when games a GPU limited and when running it over 200 FPS generally the CPU is already doing quite a bit of the work I've also got results here from an NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2070 playing the game at the same framerate so around the 220 FPS mark input latency was a little high in general so anti lag does provide the best overall performance however given we're only talking about a formula ii difference it's not a significant result in my opinion next up we have fortnight and again this is a game that's going to run really well on most hardware even playing the game on the epic preset at 1080p I was achieving 170 FPS or so during testing so a lot of the same issues as Rainbow six siege are present here Radio Nancy lag was consistently faster in the range of 2 to 4 milliseconds better but with frames coming in every five point nine milliseconds or so we simply aren't going to get much more of a reduction in input latency in fact AMD says that the benefits of Radio Nancy lag are most pronounced when gaming between 60 90 FPS and in the two games we've tested so far even with maximum quality settings I was easily more than double that sort of framerate this is pretty important to know and will factor into the conclusion in just a moment or two but before that I did wanna test a game I knew would hit AMD's sweet spot zone and that's Metro Exodus in this title I set the game to the extreme preset and was hitting around 75 FPS in our test area and as expected the advantages to ride an ante lag were more obvious here I saw a reduction in input lag of between four point six and ten point six milliseconds depending on the sync method used with that latter number showing that we're getting near a full frame reduction in Metro Exodus at these frame rates achieving 18% better performance or a 15% reduction in input lag is a strong result compared to what we've seen the final game I found really interesting was battlefield 5 this game has a mode called future frame rendering in which you can switch off for better latency according to the in-game information so for testing I set that mode to off as and went about comparing anti-lag on and off as it turns out ANSI lag has next to no effect when this mode is already enabled so it seems that at least for this title running in its dx11 mode developer EA dice had already figured out how to minimize input latency and implemented their own toggle so yeah that's kind of neat now you might be wondering if Radeon anti-lag improves input lag in games why isn't this just enabled by default is there any downside and the answer to that is yes but in some situations it's not really a significant downside I tested a number of games with Radeon anti-lag on and off to see the performance impact several of these had a negligible performance drop we're talking one fps in Metro Exodus 3 FPS in rainbow 6 siege less than 1 FPS in resident evil 2 and no difference in battlefield 5 all looking at average frame rates the impact of 1% lowest could be anywhere from delivering a consistent improvement to lowering performance slightly however there were also some tiles where the performance impact was more substantial in fortnight I saw a 6% drop to performance or 7 fps looking at average frame rates with an even larger drop to 1% lows the hit was even larger in hitman 2 at over 11% MD says it isn't unusual to see a performance impact in titles but not others so your mileage will vary certainly sometimes you can enable anti-lag without worrying and other times the hit will be noticeable so that's the testing I managed to get done for this video sorry it wasn't a bit more comprehensive but to get this level of consistency and accuracy with input load testing it does take a lot of repetition and results in any case I think it paints an interesting picture and there's a few things I want to discuss so firstly it's clear that Radeon anti-lag it does what it sets out to do ambi said it delivers about a one frame improvement input lag in GPU limited scenarios and works best when gaming in the sixty to ninety FPS range and that's exactly what I found in high frame rate situations you might get a two to four millisecond improvement which is up to one frame and then at lower frame rates I saw up to a ten millisecond improvement the trade-off is in some games you will see a performance impact in others you won't - just varies a bit this is all fine it works it's good but I just don't think is this important or revolutionary as ambu suggested is let's look at this chart in particular from their Radeon anti-lag website which shows a range of competitive games receiving twenty to thirty five percent reductions to input latency with anti-lag enables why is this different to my testing well that's because only tested these games running at 60 to 90 fps rather than the hundreds of frames per second you'd normally expect in fact if you look at the fine print ambi says they're tested with the core i7 9700 K which is a fast gaming CPU but chose to use the 3840 by 2160 resolution aka 4k now normally don't have any problem with that testing games at 4k is fine some people will be playing at 4k but they're your more casual quality focus gamers who want the best visuals competitive gamers who are highly sensitive to input latency the target for a feature like Radeon anti-lag definitely will not or at least should not be gaming at 4k the reason for that is gaming at 4k considerably reduces your framerate compared to playing at a lower resolution like 1080p and one of the simplest ways to reduce input latency is to increase the frame rate this is why most serious competitive gamers play at 1080p low settings with high refresh rate displays and fast CPUs they're often CPU limited and playing at 200 plus FPS to ensure their gameplay is smooth responsive and minimally affected by input lag so with the proper gaming setup for low latency performance and I didn't go especially overboard to achieve this in my testing in fact I often used ultra quality settings as opposed to low-quality sayings radio and Auntie lag is only going to deliver maybe a 5 millisecond or so reduction to input latency for highly sensitive game is this well it might be a big deal but I certainly could not tell the difference when gaming although I'm not the sort of person that is overly sensitive to input lag to begin with the only conclusion I can come to is Radeon anti-lag really isn't designed for true competitive gamers that wants super low input latency because the gains you get in latency toon scenarios are minimal this leaves it in kind of a weird position now don't get me wrong it's not a bad feature or useless or anything like that if you are casually gaming in that 60 to 90 FPS zone for whatever reason and you just want a reduction in input latency great you can now hit a button and shave off maybe 10 to 15 milliseconds but if you're more serious about reducing input lag you'll get a much bigger improvement out of simply increasing your framerate and that could be by lowering the settings in battlefield 5 for example toning down some settings and going from 70 to 120 fps shaved off 22 milliseconds of input lag and delivered smoother gameplay and that's what I'd recommend doing first but in the process of course it will diminish the advantage you can get from anti lag I guess in the end I was hoping radio Nancy lag would be a significant feature for those who are most concerned about input lag the highly competitive skilled latency sensitive gamers the ones that research input lag and optimize their setups accordingly instead while it does have a minor impact for those gamers ranty lag is more suited to improving the casual gaming experience which I'm not sure cares about a one frame input latency reduction all that much especially if there's a potential for a drop in framerate the one use case I could see this being handy for other competitive gamers who have low-end Hardware maybe a risin 530 400 G or something like that who would already be playing at 1080p low settings on the integrated graphics and sitting around that framerate sweet spot for Radio Nancy lag with nowhere lower to go in terms of getting better frame rates it could be a handy toggle to reduce input latency further maybe that's something to explore in a future video anyway that's it on Radio anti-lag for now to hear your thoughts in the comments below and how useful this sort of thing will be for you whether that one-frame improvement is something that you're after and whether you'll be tolerating that performance it in some titles consider subscribing for more Hardware testing we also have our patreon page if you want to support us I'll catch you in the next one