Let's not talk too much..... will try not to 😂... Read carefully to understand properly 😎.
So what forms latency?
Take a look at this image from Nvidia.



Rendering Queue is an additional significant latency that forms the period between Frame submission by CPU to the driver and GPU Rendering in the latency pipeline. Nothing else, but the GPU driver and the game engine are responsible of this latency whether it is high or low.

WTH is this Rendering latency that you have just brought it up to us in Black Squad community and how much does it matter, can you please explain it and how do we lower it?

Basically, this guide is here to answer this question.

Render Queue are frames that have been submitted by the CPU waiting to be rendered by the GPU (usually only 1 frame).
To understand the impact of the Render Queue on your latency as a competitive gamer imagine the difference between playing at 60 FPS and 120 FPS:

60 FPS + 0 Render Queue = 120 FPS + 1 Render Queue

This means if we can get rid of the Render queue we will get the experience of playing at double the amount of frame rates which is great!, isn't right?
Nvidia Reflex Technology is meant to do that by synchronizing the CPU and the GPU work together so that once the CPU submit the frame to the driver to be rendered it gets caught immediately by the GPU and start rendering eliminating the render queue completely.

How that works?

Let's take an example of the general situation assuming we have 100 FPS 100% GPU usage without frame rate limits:

PC Latency: CPU [Input sampling 5ms + #3 Frame (Simulation 3ms + Submision 7ms)] + #2 Frame (Render Queue 10 ms) + #1 Frame (Rendering 10ms) = 35ms
so we have 3 frames in the pipeline: one being rendered, two in the Queue, and 3 in the CPU

What Nvidia Reflex does is making the newest #3 frame wait while the older frame is being rendered for 7ms (Submision time), and once 7 ms passes (70% of the frame was already rendered), it will start the CPU simulation process of the newer frame so that once simulation is done, the older frame will also be done at once allowing the CPU to push the frame to the GPU immediately without any render queue which means no #2 frame and no submission time

PC Latency with Reflex: CPU (Input sampling 5ms + #2 Frame Simulation 3ms) + #1 Frame (Rendering 10ms) = 18ms

We gained 17 ms reduction in latency, and that is about 1.7x times the frame time; the actual rendering time that your high FPS is meant to lower!

Unfortunately, our game black squad doesn't have an integration or any support for Reflex technology, but there is a workarounds that we can do to remove the Render Queue by limiting the frame rates, and lowering the GPU usage, so instead of having Nvidia reflex telling the CPU to wait while the GPU is rendering the newer frame, we tell it to wait, by limiting the frame rates 😏. this will also tell the GPU to wait after rendering a frame, and the lower the GPU usage is the better the results are.

How this works:

Let's take an example of the scenario at 40% GPU usage and 100 FPS limit:

PC Latency: CPU [Input sampling 5ms + The wait by FPS limit 6ms + #2 Frame (Simulation 3ms) + #1 Frame (Rendering 4ms) = 18ms

That if the new frame was not submitted during the actual GPU rendering time which mean the lower the actual rendering time is the the more likely you will have no frames in the Render Queue
The more the waiting time is, the more likely for the GPU to be ready to get the next frame to render... more ready means less Render Queue, and the relation is not linear. having your GPU usage at 40% doesn't mean you will have no frames in render Queue 60% of the times. I won't go deep in math to describe it. if I do so this guide will never end.

Simply "At the same FPS" the faster your GPU is the lower the rendering latency is.

The lower the GPU usage is, the lower the rendering latency is.

Playing Black Squad at GPU usage 99% all the time is a latency crime. 😅

Running into CPU Bottleneck is going to lower the rendering latency due to lower GPU usage, so if you are always limited heavily by the CPU/RAM performance then your only problem would be stutters and an FPS limit may or may not help you.

This means "At the same locked FPS" if you Overclock your GPU you will get a lower rendering latency because GPU usage will become less.

Rendering Queue isn't at all small. it can go as low as sub 1 ms and as high as double the frame time if not even more...... (as bad as Vsync added latency)

A Configuration Example and Results:

We paired an I9 with an old GTX 1060 on 1080p Ultra settings to make sure that we are at 99% GPU usage. at certain areas benchmark we had about 8-11 ms rendering latency at 160 avg FPS which means 10 + 1000/160 = 16.25 ms.
As you can see the rendering latency is even more than the actual frame time!

We later dropped settings to low which gave us a nice boost in FPS to around 280 FPS on avg, but the rendering latency was about the same 7-9 ms which means 8 + 1000/280 = 11.5 ms.

We chose to limit FPS to 120 and overclock the graphic card, and we ended up with 1-2 ms rendering latency at 120 FPS, and 30% GPU usage which means 1.5 + 1000/120 = 10 ms.

by comparing the 3 situations our latency became lowest at the lowest FPS! and even lower than the 280 FPS so if I was using a weaker CPU then stutters are likely to happen at over 200 FPS so with the FPS limit you won't only lower the latency but may also eliminate stutters.

This means At the same FPS the better... faster GPU is going to give lower latency and by Overclocking your GPU you will also get lower latency.

OK.... now WTF this all means???! what should I do to get the lowest latency possible?

Here are things to try to do:
What you need to do is to lower GPU usage.

1- Use native resolution and an FPS limit that can usually be maintained by your system and try to lower settings that appears to reduce the GPU usage.... try to drop GPU usage as much as you can without making the game looks crap.. lower usage always means lower latency

2- If you are on 240 Hz then try limiting FPS to 240 or even 200 if you still at near 90% GPU usage
3- If you are on a 144 Hz monitor then try limiting your FPS to 144 or less if you still at near 90% GPU usage.
4- If you are on 120 Hz then you may also try to limit your GPU usage by limiting the FPS to 120 or 100.
5- If you are on 75 Hz monitor then try 120-100-75 FPS limit and I advise against 60 FPS limit in any situation.
6- Drop your Resolution and enable Image Scaling from Nvidia control panel with 12-15% sharpening or enable Radeon Image Sharpening for AMD (no idea how much % does not oversharpen 🤷‍♀️), that if your PC or laptop GPU sucks and your play style is usually cornering and avoid long distance rifling.
7-If you are using RTX 3080-4070-4070Ti-4080-4090 then don't do anything 😅

I've seen that nobody here or at Valofe have explained this setting to players, so I am happy to clarify it for you 😊

Back to this image from Nvidia:



Thread Sync is more like a parallel processing between threads in the CPU more like multi core rendering which will require higher multi-threaded performance which may drop the FPS if the CPU isn't powerful enough.

Thread Sync reduces "Game Latency" shown in the image. It has nothing to do with Render Queue or GPU Rendering and it doesn't trigger stutters or multiply them if you have them already.

Nvidia did quite a good job naming it Game Latency and not CPU latency which is more accurate and representative for the real situation. the CPU by itself isn't a latency contributor, but rather the game code itself so if you either have a high end or low end CPU game latency won't change unless the CPU is heavily limiting the GPU performance with FPS a lot bellow monitor Hz which is a different story.

It is almost always useful to turn it on unless your FPS is lower than your monitor Hz and the FPS difference is remarkable in a way that will hurt your smooth experience you already have.

for example if you have about 120 FPS and thread sync dropped that to about 90 FPS and you are on 75 Hz monitor then thread sync is going to lower your latency due to lower GPU usage + lower Game latency. it is definitely worthy to be enabled, but if you are on 120 HZ monitor, and 40 ms or lower ping and you really used to appreciate the smoother motion of the 120 FPS then that is not worthy and keep it off.

After all situations where Thread sync would harm your experience are extremely unlikely... unless you are on a super potato sub 70 FPS system 48-70 FPS


SOOO..... Yeah Buddy Enable That ALWAYS

What you need to do is to [lower GPU usage with lower settings + an FPS limit] and [Enable Thread Sync if 1- your lowest FPS (not the 1% lows!) still over 75 FPS 2- over 80% of monitor Hz]
This is the shortest way I can summarize the whole guide

Simply At the same FPS count the faster your GPU is the lower the rendering latency is.
The lower the GPU usage is, the lower the rendering latency is.
Running into CPU Bottleneck is going to lower the rendering latency due to lower GPU usage, so if you are always limited heavily by the CPU/RAM performance then your only problem would be stutters and an FPS limit may or may not help you.
Stutters are likely to happen at over 200 FPS so with the FPS limit you won't only lower the latency in high GPU usage situation but may also eliminate stutters.
At the same FPS the better... faster GPU is going to give lower latency.
This means At the same locked FPS if you Overclock your GPU you will get a lower rendering latency because GPU usage will become less.

Here are things to try to do:

1- Use native resolution and and FPS limit that can usually be maintained by your system and try to lower settings that appears to reduce the GPU usage.... try to drop GPU usage as much as you can without making the game looks crap.. lower usage always means lower latency.

2- If you are on 240 Hz then try limiting FPS to 240 or even 200 if you still at near 90% GPU usage
3- If you are on a 144 Hz monitor then try limiting your FPS to 144 or 120 if you still at near 90% GPU usage.
4- If you are on 120 Hz then you may also try to limit your GPU usage by limiting the FPS to 120 or 100.
5- If you are on 75 Hz monitor then try 120-100-75 FPS limit and I advise against 60 FPS limit in any situation.
6- Drop your Resolution and enable Image Scaling from Nvidia control panel with 12-15% sharpening or enable Radeon Image Sharpening for AMD, that if your PC or laptop GPU sucks and your play style is usually cornering and avoid long distance rifling.
7-If you are using RTX 3080-4070-4070Ti-4080-4090 then don't do anything 😅

If you have about 120 FPS and Thread Sync dropped that to about 90 FPS and you are on 75 Hz monitor then thread sync is going to lower your latency due to lower GPU usage + lower Game latency.

After all situations where Thread Sync would harm your experience are extremely unlikely...
Unless you are on a super potato sub 70 FPS system 48-70 FPS so Enable Thread Sync always