How to Reduce Input Lag on PC: The Whole Latency Chain
Short answer
UpdatedTo reduce input lag, work through the whole chain: turn V-Sync off, cap your frame rate about three below your refresh rate with G-Sync or FreeSync on, enable NVIDIA Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag 2, play in exclusive fullscreen, turn off Enhance Pointer Precision, use raw input and set monitor overdrive to its middle setting. That shortens the longest waits: the render queue, V-Sync and the compositor.
Key takeaways
- Frame rate and input lag are related but different. You can have 300 FPS and terrible latency, and the usual cause is V-Sync.
- The three largest, cheapest wins are: V-Sync off, a frame cap inside the VRR window, and Reflex or Anti-Lag enabled.
- Going from 60 Hz to 144 Hz removes far more latency than going from 144 Hz to 240 Hz. The returns diminish sharply.
- Mouse polling above 1000 Hz has very small returns and measurably increases CPU load: it is not a free upgrade.
- Enhance Pointer Precision is mouse acceleration. It does not add latency but it makes your aim inconsistent, which people misreport as lag.
- What you are measuring
- Click-to-photon: input to visible response
- Where the delay hides
- Render queue, V-Sync and the compositor
- Biggest single cost
- V-Sync: up to a full frame
- Cheapest fix
- Frame cap below refresh with VRR on
The nine stages between your click and the screen
What people call input lag is properly called click-to-photon latency: the total time between your finger moving and a photon changing on your monitor. It is not one delay. It is nine, in series, and fixing the wrong one gets you nothing.
| Setting | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Mouse sensor and switch | 1-3 ms | Determined by polling rate and switch debounce. Already small on any modern gaming mouse; not where your problem is. |
| 2. USB transport | under 1 ms | Effectively free unless you are on a saturated hub. Move high-polling mice to a rear port off the chipset. |
| 3. Windows input processing | 1-2 ms | Small, but this is where mouse acceleration lives. Raw input in game bypasses part of this stack. |
| 4. Game simulation tick | 1-8 ms | How often the engine samples input. Largely fixed by the game; higher frame rates sample more often in most engines. |
| 5. Render queue | 0-30 ms | The big one. Frames queued ahead of the GPU wait their turn. This is exactly what NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag shorten. |
| 6. GPU render time | 3-20 ms | Inversely proportional to frame rate. Higher FPS genuinely helps here, with diminishing returns. |
| 7. Present and composition | 0-16 ms | Exclusive fullscreen is near zero. Borderless windowed goes through the compositor unless Windows windowed-game optimizations are on. |
| 8. Scanout | 4-16 ms | Set by refresh rate. A 240 Hz panel scans a frame in about 4 ms, a 60 Hz panel in about 16 ms. |
| 9. Panel response | 1-10 ms | Pixel transition time, controlled by your overdrive setting. Too high produces inverse ghosting, which looks worse than it measures. |
The changes that actually remove milliseconds
Turn V-Sync off everywhere
In game, in the NVIDIA Control Panel or AMD Adrenalin, and in any third-party limiter. V-Sync holds a completed frame until the next refresh, which costs up to a full refresh interval: 16 ms at 60 Hz. It is the single most expensive latency setting on most systems.
Cap your frame rate below your refresh rate
With G-Sync or FreeSync enabled, cap about three frames below your panel's refresh: 237 on 240 Hz, 141 on 144 Hz. Running uncapped pushes you against the refresh ceiling where frames queue, which reintroduces exactly the delay you removed by disabling V-Sync.
Enable NVIDIA Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag 2
Turn it on in every game that offers it, and use On + Boost on NVIDIA. It shortens the render queue directly, which is stage 5: the largest recoverable chunk. The frame cost is small and the latency reduction is not.
Play in exclusive fullscreen
Borderless windowed routes your frames through the Windows compositor. If you need borderless for alt-tabbing, at least enable 'Optimizations for windowed games' in Settings > System > Display > Graphics, which recovers most of the difference.
Confirm your monitor is at full refresh rate
Settings > System > Display > Advanced display. Windows regularly reverts a high-refresh monitor to 60 Hz after a driver install or cable change, and this is the most common cause of a new monitor not feeling different.
Set monitor overdrive to its middle option
Usually labelled Normal, Medium or Fast. The most aggressive setting produces inverse ghosting (bright trails behind moving objects) which is visually worse than the response time it saves. The panel's rated response time is measured at a setting most people should not use.
Disable Enhance Pointer Precision
Settings > Bluetooth & devices > Mouse > Additional mouse settings > Pointer Options. This is mouse acceleration. It does not add latency, but it makes the same physical movement produce different cursor distances, which players consistently describe as the game feeling laggy or inconsistent.
Turn on raw input in game
Where the option exists, it bypasses part of the Windows pointer pipeline and ignores desktop sensitivity and acceleration settings entirely.
Where the returns stop being worth it
Latency chasing has a point past which you are spending money for immeasurable gains. It is useful to know roughly where that point is.
| Setting | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 60 Hz to 144 Hz | Large, obvious | Scanout drops from about 16 ms to about 7 ms and frame delivery roughly doubles. This is the single most noticeable hardware upgrade available. |
| 144 Hz to 240 Hz | Modest, noticeable to some | Scanout drops from about 7 ms to about 4 ms. Real, but a fraction of the previous step. Worth it if you are already at the top of your game; not a fix for anything. |
| 240 Hz to 360 Hz+ | Very small | Roughly a further 1 ms. At this point your monitor is no longer the constraint and you would gain more from anything else on this page. |
| 1000 Hz to 4000/8000 Hz mouse polling | Very small, with a cost | Saves a fraction of a millisecond and measurably increases CPU interrupt load, which can hurt 1% lows in CPU-bound games. This is not a free upgrade and it is sometimes a net loss. |
| Wired versus 2.4 GHz wireless | Negligible on modern gear | Current dedicated gaming wireless is within about a millisecond of wired. Bluetooth is a different matter and should not be used for gaming. |
| Frame rate above 3x your refresh rate | Very small | GPU render time is already tiny at that point. The remaining latency is in scanout and panel response, which frame rate cannot touch. |
A few Windows settings come up in every input lag thread: Game DVR background recording, multiplane overlay (MPO), MSI mode for your GPU's interrupts, dynamic tick and HPET, Nagle's algorithm and the network throttling index. Next to the stages above their effect is small or depends on the system (Nagle's algorithm only touches TCP traffic, and most game traffic is UDP). Each has its own page with what it changes and how to undo it.
Measuring instead of guessing
Perceived input lag is extremely unreliable. People report a game feeling worse after a patch that changed nothing, and better after a placebo tweak. If you are going to tune this, measure it.
- NVIDIA's overlay reports a PC latency figure on supported games and GPUs, which covers stages 3 through 7. It is the easiest starting point.
- A high-frame-rate phone camera pointed at your mouse and monitor together works surprisingly well: count frames between the click and the muzzle flash.
- Change one thing at a time and re-measure. Applying six tweaks and declaring the result better tells you nothing about which one worked.
- Test in the same scene. Latency varies with GPU load, so a benchmark in an empty range does not describe a teamfight.
Frozen Tweaks
Free for Windows 10 and 11
Frozen Tweaks has free switches that turn off Game DVR recording and fullscreen optimizations, and Pro adds NVIDIA and AMD low-latency driver settings. Every catalog tweak is listed publicly with what it changes. It does not re-apply anything by itself after updates, so check these settings after a big Windows or driver update.
v2.0.0 · 6.4 MB · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · free account, no payment details
Or type frozentweaks.com on your PC.
Questions
Why does my game feel laggy at high FPS?
Because frame rate and input latency are different measurements. The usual causes are V-Sync enabled somewhere in the chain, which costs up to a full refresh interval, no frame cap on a variable-refresh display so frames queue at the refresh ceiling, NVIDIA Reflex or AMD Anti-Lag being off, or running borderless windowed without the Windows windowed-game optimization enabled. Any one of those can add more delay than a large frame-rate increase removes.
Does a higher mouse polling rate reduce input lag?
Barely, and it is not free. Going from 1000 Hz to 4000 or 8000 Hz saves a fraction of a millisecond while measurably increasing CPU interrupt load, which can hurt 1% lows in CPU-bound games like CS2 and Valorant. On most systems it is a net neutral change and on some it is a net loss. 1000 Hz is the sensible default.
Should I turn V-Sync on or off to reduce input lag?
Off, in the game and in your GPU control panel. V-Sync holds a finished frame until the monitor's next refresh, adding up to a full refresh interval of delay: about 16 ms at 60 Hz. The exception is a G-Sync setup where enabling V-Sync in the NVIDIA Control Panel while capping frames below the refresh rate acts as a safety net at the top of the VRR range rather than as a frame limiter.
Is 240 Hz worth it over 144 Hz for input lag?
It is a real but modest improvement: scanout drops from roughly 7 ms to roughly 4 ms. That is a fraction of the gain you get moving from 60 Hz to 144 Hz. Worth having if your setup is otherwise fully tuned; not a solution to a game that feels bad, which is almost always a V-Sync, frame cap or Reflex problem rather than a refresh rate one.
Does Enhance Pointer Precision cause input lag?
No, it causes inconsistency, which people describe as lag. Enhance Pointer Precision is mouse acceleration: the same physical movement produces a different cursor distance depending on how fast you move. That breaks muscle memory for aiming. Turn it off in Pointer Options and enable raw input in game, which ignores Windows pointer settings entirely.
Tweaks in this guide
Each setting below has its own page in the tweak catalog: what it changes in Windows, what it costs, and how to undo it.
Sources
- Introducing NVIDIA Reflex: Optimize and Measure Latency in Competitive Games (NVIDIA) (opens in a new tab)nvidia.com
- G-SYNC 101: input lag tests and settings (Blur Busters) (opens in a new tab)blurbusters.com
- Optimizations for windowed games in Windows 11 (Microsoft Support) (opens in a new tab)support.microsoft.com
- PresentMon (Intel) (opens in a new tab)game.intel.com
Written by
Frost LIVEFounder of Frozen Tweaks, based in Hamburg, Germany. Publishes settings guides for competitive games on his YouTube channel, Frost LIVE.
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Frozen Tweaks
Free for Windows 10 and 11
58 tweaks free, each with an undo switch. Never edits game files.
v2.0.0 · 6.4 MB · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · free account, no payment details
Or type frozentweaks.com on your PC.
The free Windows app for competitive games.
58 tweaks free, each with an undo switch. Never edits game files.
v2.0.0 · 6.4 MB · Windows 10 and 11, 64-bit · free account, no payment details
Frozen Tweaks runs on Windows. Send the link to your PC and download it there.
Or type frozentweaks.com on your PC.