Linux Gaming Latency Reductions with Korthos Software LowLatencyLayer Enabling NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti Lag 2 Across Different Graphics Cards and High End Game Benchmarks
Linux is rapidly gaining ground as a viable environment for competitive gamers thanks to community developed tools. The team over at Korthos Software has released an open source project called lowlatencylayer, a tool that allows a user to disable hardware limitations tied to NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti Lag 2 technology. It works by acting as a generic Vulkan intermediary to allow Reflex and Anti Lag 2 technology to be active irrespective of the graphics card installed in your PC.
Technically speaking the project intercepts Vulkan commands to introduce frame pacing and lag reduction methods without relying on any proprietary graphics drivers.
This eliminates one of the key hindrances to using Linux for gaming, as the system historically wouldn't support certain optimization features depending on the game.
The Korthos Software team rigorously tested their software on a high end Windows PC with a Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics card and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor across four high end titles Counter Strike 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Overwatch 2, and Marvel Rivals. The results show that on average, the latency reductions found under Linux are comparable to Windows while some areas are even better.
Counter Strike 2 was also observed to have lower overall latency on Linux with Anti Lag 2 compared to native Windows. Some attribute this to the background resource usage being much lower on Linux than Windows and the lack of certain telemetry and background processes running on the system. These results strongly suggest the Linux community is bridging the competitive gaming performance gap that has long been attributed to the Windows operating system.
Despite the promising performance results, installation is manual. Users will have to modify environment variables, and adjust certain Vulkan and Proton configurations particularly on the Linux side for users playing Windows games on Proton such as enabling NVAPI support, so that the tool works as expected. Detailed guides on setting up this feature can be found on the GitHub project page.
This generic layer will serve a huge purpose in enabling competitive gamers to achieve their best performance on Linux, as they will no longer have to concern themselves with being locked out of a particular graphics card optimization feature. As it matures, the Korthos Software tool is expected to become standard on many Linux gaming setups where latency and input lag are the most critical factors in gameplay.
