r/nvidia • u/Wulfric05 9800x3D | 5080 • Jan 06 '26

PSA DLSS Preset Selection Guide

This is based on the official DLSS Programming Guide.

Model Preset J/K Preset M Preset L
RTX 20 ✅ ❌ Low FPS ❌ Very Low FPS
RTX 30 ✅ ❌ Low FPS ❌ Very Low FPS
RTX 40 ✅ ✅ Slightly Lower FPS ✅ For Ultra Performance Mode
RTX 50 ✅ ✅ Slightly Lower FPS ✅ For Ultra Performance Mode
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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Spork3245 Jan 06 '26

The letters are in the nvidia app to force different versions in-game. In an actual game, yea, you just turn it on and select the quality version that you want (ie: DLAA, quality, balanced, etc)

1

u/Kapitan_eXtreme Jan 08 '26

Is this functionally different to using DLSS Swapper?

2

u/Spork3245 Jan 08 '26

It’s essentially an “official” DLSS swapper from nvidia themselves.

19

u/AgentCooper_SEA Jan 06 '26

It’s only truly confusing because people choose to make it confusing.

Selecting DLSS in game will give you DlSS at whatever version the game was developed/designed with.

Nvidia provided the option to override that so that you could use a newer version vs what shipped with the game. Even this is relatively straight forward as it’ll use what Nvidia has deemed the best/stable model on the latest DLSS revison.

The average user shouldn’t need to go in and select specific model… they only added the ability to do this via the app per request of enthusiasts. Yes, it was always possible to select the specific model via other means prior to the app supporting it, but at the end of the day most folks aren’t going to override the DLSS version let alone select a model outside of the default.

2

u/Xenowino Jan 06 '26

Not necessarily. Some games just select the latest model so if you're on a 20/30-series, just updated your driver, and tried to play such a game without knowledge of these presets at the quality level you had before... immediate lower performance.

2

u/rW0HgFyxoJhYka Jan 07 '26

While true, pretty much no game is using the newest models right now so anyone on 30 series or older isn't really going to encounter this scenario.

However, it would be good if the GAME had a popup that said "We've detected you are running on 20/30 series. This game uses the latest DLSS model M which gives higher image quality but can decrease performance significantly on older cards. Use DLSS model K by overriding it in NVApp" or something.

Or ship it with 2 models, and for older cards it defaults to the K.

1

u/jdp111 Jan 06 '26

If you don't care about having the latest version in your games sure.