Nvidia LDAT & PCAT – What Are They?

Final Thoughts

Why would you need this hardware? Well, in fairness, it’s likely that you won’t need this hardware yourself for your own gaming rig. However, for the professional reviewers and system builders out there, it can be a very potent set of tools to have. The aim would be to ensure any system is running at its optimal configuration or to gauge the performance of a new piece of hardware and relay that information to consumers and gamers alike.

For example, you could test the impact of features like the Nvidia Reflex Low Latency Mode. Sure, turning it on and off and seeing what difference it makes to your gaming performance is one thing, but the LDAT can give you a true readout of how these sorts of settings improve your system performance. Given that Reflex Low Latency mode has to be integrated into a game by the developer, I’m sure some games may even handle this feature better than others. However, if you’re using a less accurate method, such as a frame rate limit of your own to reduce latency, you can still use this same hardware to measure the improvements and impacts of those choices.

eSports and Beyond

An eSports team are equipped with 12 brand-new gaming PCs from their sponsor, ready to compete. However, rather than only doing traditional things like reducing graphics quality or resolution, or throwing a more powerful graphics card in there, all of which can improve system performance and response times, LDAT and PCAT with FrameView 1.1 give them many more options. You can test multiple games and multiple graphics settings and see which impact latency and FPS directly and accurately. You can test frame rate limiters, Reflex, and other features to see which gives the system the best performance, etc.

Of course, it goes beyond that too, as you can test the whole pipeline, which can lead to an informed choice of all the hardware in this ecosystem. From the mouse they use, to each system component, driver configurations, APIs, graphics cards, and finally, which displays they should be using. While the result may not change the hearts and minds of some gamers, shaving response times can be the difference between winning that $1,000,000 1st prize tournament and going home empty-handed.

Everyone Can Benefit

If at-home or enthusiast gamers then see that a certain combination of peripherals, internal PC hardware, and monitor are scoring wins for people, it will certainly have an impact on sales of that hardware, or inform more gamers what settings are optimal, as a sort of trickle-down effect.

Again, the same sort of information can be captured and discussed by hardware reviews like ourselves and passed on to consumers in our reviews and features. Either way, it’s creating an ecosystem of fine-tuning gaming performance for everyone. Once the benchmark is set, it gives a new target for the next generation of hardware to beat, pushing latency figures lower and lower over time.

Nvidia LDAT & PCAT

So there you have it, while the hardware isn’t exactly new, the benefits of it are still being realised and will continue to be. No doubt we’ll find other aspects of PC hardware to tackle and new and interesting ways. For now, buying a faster graphics card or CPU, and running a higher refresh rate display will get you most of the thrills here, but cutting little latency issues and improving efficiency is certainly the icing on the cake.