Nvidia LDAT & PCAT – What Are They?

What is the Latency and Display Analysis Tool (LDAT)?

As a gamer, you’ll know the importance of frame rates, and if you don’t, well… I dunno, maybe you’ll learn something today. Higher framerates are generally favoured, as it results in a smoother on-screen picture, and typically also leads to lower response times and latencies. However, throwing more GPU horsepower at a game, or tinkering with the in-game graphics sliders can only get you so far. Latency is the new battleground, and LDAT is about finding out if you can improve latency on a system-wide scale.

What is Latency?

Well, it’s the “delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its transfer” according to the dictionary. All online gamers have experienced it in some form or another. You press fire on a perfect headshot, and it still misses. Because the information of where the player is or your bullet took too long to get to each other. However, did you think to factor in the latency of your mouse, your drivers, your operating system, graphics card, CPU, memory, the game engine, and even your monitor? It’s unlikely you do, but online latency (lag), and system latency all add up.

Why Does it Matter?

Well, for your typical at-home gamer who’s romping around in Skyrim, it doesn’t matter too much. However, that doesn’t mean gamers won’t see the advantages of this testing hardware in the long run. eSports is the real battleground for this hardware though. Investing in hardware that can accurately measure system latency can be the edge people need for a win. If you test two PCs side by side and one has a 30ms latency over the other when you pull the trigger in CS:GO, which would you think an eSports team would choose?!

Formula 1 will spend millions shaving 10ths of a second from a lap time by fine-tuning the smallest details of their cars. Runners will invest in expensive trainers which have had millions spent on R&D to improve grip, comfort and speed, and really, you’ll see similar things across many industries, sports, etc. While in the PC world, just making things faster has gotten us so far, it’s really not the whole picture. Faster refresh rate monitors, fastest GPUs, faster CPUs, you get the idea. measuring latency is going to help ensure that raw power isn’t the only way to improve a PC, much like F1 doesn’t simply just use a larger/faster engine to improve times. Does your new mouse, your new monitor, your new RAM settings or anything else you’ve done really improve performance? LDAT will tell you.