The popularity of battle royale games continue to soar and players are trying to find ways to get an advantage in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Fortnite, and even Apex Legends. So what's the secret?
According to research released by NVIDIA, having higher frames per second (FPS), coupled with a high refresh rate monitor, can give you an advantage and better K/D ratio. For those not familiar, the K/D ratio is the number of times a player has killed another players divided by the number of times other players has killed that same player.
This may sound self-serving considering NVIDIA is the largest manufacturer of graphics cards. To their credit however, they did crunch the numbers. NVIDIA says that higher FPS means players are able to see the next frame faster and can respond accordingly.
When using a high Hz monitor, having higher FPS means that images have a smoother appearance and maks even moving targets easier to aim at. In addition, when combined with G-SYNC technologies, like Ultra Low Motion Blur, higher FPS makes text and objects sharper. This results in players being able to understand fast moving scenes better.
In terms of figures, NVIDIA utilized anonymized GeForce Experience Highlights data on K/D events for both PUBG and Fortnite. Using the GeForce GTX 600-Series as the baseline, the graph below shows that the K/D ratio increases in accordance to the successive GPU generation going as high as 53 percent for the RTC 2000-Series.
It goes without saying that having better hardware doesn't immediately make you a better player. NVIDIA looked into the number of hours per week that gamers play. The graph reveals that having a better graphics card can indeed help players, even if one is playing a few times per week. The conclusion is that the higher the players skill level, the more benefit the player experiences from better hardware.
NVIDIA did not stop there as the company also looked into the impact of using high resolution monitors. The results show that higher resolutions do have an impact on FPS.
Ultimately, NVIDIA says that players who want to experience the best performance should optimize their system to have 144+ FPS and use a 144 Hz monitor. While it does not mean having better hardware makes you become a better player, it is a good way to start your journey on becoming a fearsome battle royale player.
A full copy of NVIDIA’s research can be accessed here.
