Open‑Source Layer Brings NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti‑Lag 2 to Any GPU on Linux

Technologies like NVIDIA's Reflex and AMD's very similar Anti-Lag 2 provide real input latency benefits by modulating the timing between game render frames and game simulation frames. On Windows, anyway; on Linux, these features have historically not been supported due to missing driver-level support. A developer named Korthos Software decided to take matters into its own hands and has created a shim for Linux that enables these latency-reduction technologies on the free OS, and it also brings these capabilities to both AMD and Intel GPUs even when Reflex is the only supported option.

The input lag reductions that can be achieved with these technologies is remarkable. In the developer's own testing, he cut input latency in Marvel Rivals from a high of 40ms all the way down to as low as 20ms by using NVIDIA's Reflex on his Radeon RX 7900 XTX. That's more than a full frame of input lag saved at 60 FPS, and given he was testing at 1080p, he was certainly seeing a lot more than 60 FPS.


The developer tested six games quite exhaustively, with hundreds of test runs in each: The Finals, Counter-Strike 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Resident Evil: Requiem, Marvel Rivals, and Overwatch 2. The results are quite clear: in all tested cases, the Korthos low_latency_layer shim delivered equivalent-or-better results versus proprietary implementations of Reflex and Anti-lag 2 on Windows. It's seriously impressive stuff, and all the more so because of its vendor-agnostic nature.

In an e-mail to Phoronix, lead developer Nicolas James explains why he started the project, and his motives basically boil down to frustration with the state of low-latency gaming on Linux. As he explains, Mesa already had a low-latency mode, but it isn't very effective and in some cases even seems to increase latency. He performed his testing using a 540-Hz monitor that integrates NVIDIA's Reflex Analyzer, a hardware-based tool built into certain monitors that allows users to analyze end-to-end input latency.


If you're keen to check out the open-source project, you've got a little bit of work ahead of you. There's no pre-packaged version yet, so you'll have to compile it yourself; if you don't already have them, you'll have to install cmake, Vulkan headers, and the Vulkan Utility Libraries as well as do some tweaking on any Proton-based games you want to play. It's not hassle-free, but we could easily imagine Valve integrating this technology into SteamOS sooner rather than later. Gaming on Linux continues to get better and better.