Nvidia DLSS Presets: What do they mean, and which one should you choose?

Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling tech has slowly but certainly become a necessity if you’re playing cutting-edge AAAs. The more you know about DLSS, the more effectively you can use it, and I find that DLSS Presets, specifically, are important if you care about image quality and motion clarity.

Here are the facts, then: DLSS has become something of a universal upscaler since 2018, thanks in no small part due to Nvidia’s effective stranglehold on the PC gaming market. More specifically, found in Steam users’ PCs, and the RTX 3060 is the most popular single piece of GPU hardware. This means that most PC gamers actually have access to DLSS, which makes it the go-to option over FSR and XeSS in a practical sense.

All of this is to say that you, too, are statistically already familiar with DLSS at some level. Nvidia itself claims that , and this tracks. It’s all well and good, too, but did you know you can get way more use out of your specific DLSS implementation in almost any modern꧃ PC game? All thanks💧 to DLSS Presets and the way they can be manually fine-tuned.

What are DLSS Presets?

DLSS Presets are effectively a hidden feature of Nvidia’s ubiquitous upscaler. They’re customized, purpose-built modifiers for the baseline DLSS, and they exist separate of the more familiar DLSS quality option. To be more exact, each level of DLSS quality, ranging from Ultra Performance all the way to DLAA proper, can be modified further with a dedicated Preset. Thing is, Nvidia doesn’t actually allow you to do this manually by default. Even the new 572.16 driver, which comes with a DLSS override feature, doesn’t have full access to Presets.

Presets are generally hidden away from the end-user because they’re usually properly set up for the model they’re optimizing. At least, that is the case at the time of a game’s release and/or some of its subsequent updates.

You see, one of the biggest problems with DLSS as it currently stands is that there’s no way to reliably keep it up-to-date across the board. Up until now, the job of updating the DLSS model fell upon the developers themselves. Though we’ve got games such as Cyberpunk 2077, which 👍keep✃s pushing the graphical envelope time and again, the majority of DLSS-supported games aren’t privy to anything like this. So, the odds are good that the majority of your DLSS-ready games are actually stuck on old, outdated, and subpar builds of the upscaler.

To circle back over to Presets, if you’ve got the old version of DLSS in your game and wish to update it, then you’re going to want to tweak its Preset, too, just to get the best possible result. Several problems to keep in mind:

• Nvidia doesn’t explain what Presets are and how they work.
• There’s no obvious way to figure out which Preset works best in which use case, short of trial and error.
• The official Nvidia App’s DLSS Override feature is subpar, at best.

Thankf♔ully,𒈔 I can help on all three of these fronts.

What is the best DLSS Preset?

First things first, let’s go over all the DLSS Presets and explain where each should be used:

• DLSS Preset A: The basic, default choice for the more mainstream DLSS modes (i.e. Performance, Balance, and Quality). Preset A has been around for a long while, and it’s a good choice if you want to deal with excessive ghosting, especially if you’re using it in a game that doesn’t have all the DLSS inputs, like motion vectors for example.
• DLSS Preset B: A special variant of Preset A that’s purpose-built specifically to improve upon the Ultra Performance DLSS tier.
• DLSS Preset C: A modified variant of Preset A designed for fast-paced games that prefer current frame meta-data over anything else. You get a less temporally stable image, but the flip side is that you don’t get much ghosting in turn.
• DLSS Preset D: A modified variant of Preset A designed for slower-paced games that take more temporal data into account than Preset C. It’s the flipped version of Preset C, effectively, deliveingr improved image stability at the risk of extra ghosting.
• DLSS Preset E: A generally improved sub-variant of Preset D, and it should be used over D in most cases.
• DLSS Preset F: The default DLSS Preset version used for Ultra-Performance and DLAA levels of supersampling. Very minor ghosting present if used at its targeted DLSS quality levels.
• DLSS Preset G: Currently unused, from the look of it.
• DLSS Preset J: The baseline Transformer-based DLSS, delivering a substantial improvement in image quality compared to the other Presets’ CCN-based model.
• DLSS Preset K: A further improvement upon Preset J, which seems to reduce vegetation shimmering (though it’s still present in affected games).

Whew, that’s a heck of a list, isn’t it? And, of course, Nvidia is slowly but surely releasing all-new Presets along the way. Presets J and K, for example, are essentially all-new and a part of the DLSS4 feature suite.

With that all out of the way, even though my description of each of these models should give you an idea of how and where to use each, there are always exceptions to the rule. Heck, preferences also play into your choice of DLSS Preset, as you might’ve spotted when checking out Presets C and D, for example.

If you’re really pixel-peeping and want to optimize your DLSS experience, you’re probably going to want to try out virtually all of these in your target game. One piece of advice I can offer across the board is that Preset E is generally considered to be the optimal baseline in most cases and a st♑able default for you to fall back upon if things go awry.

How to change the DLSS Preset?

The best𝐆 and easiest way to tweak your DLSS Preset settings is, once again, to rely on a third-party tool someone else prepared for this exact purpose. Thanks, Nvidia! I recommend using and going ham with it.

There’s an awful lot of stuff you can do with the DLSSTweaker, depending on how in-depth you want to go, and switching Presets couldn’t be easier. Simply copy the app’s files into your game’s installation folder, open the “DLSSTweaksConfig” executable, and then enjoy the ability to edit every single DLSS quality level according to your preference at once.

This is an extremely powerful tool and I’ve been using it for a very long while now without problems. The caveat to keep in mind, however, is that DLSSTweaks outright replaces a game installation’s DLSS .dll files, so you don’t want to use this in online games. Overzealous anti-cheat software and all that.

Can I change the DLSS Preset in the Nvidia App?

As of the Nvidia App version released on January 30, 2025, you actually can change the active DLSS Preset… in some specific, supported games. The fact of the matter is that even though the Nvidia App has this functionality, it’s way too limited in a practical sense.

To change the DLSS Preset in the Nvidia App, go to the “Graphics” tab and find the game you wish to tweak, hoping along the way that it’s one of the lucky supported titles (hint: it’s probably not). Click on the game in question and scroll all the way to the “Driver Settings” menu. Select the “DLSS Override – Model Presets” option and then edit the “Super Resolution” drop-down menu according to your preference. Good luck!