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 may 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,Nvidia GPUs account for over 75% of the graphics processorsfound 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 thatover 80% of RTX graphics card owners play with Deep-Learning Super Sampling enabled, and this tracks. It’s all well and good, too, but did you know you can getwaymore 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, whichcomes with a DLSS override feature, doesn’t have full access to Presets.
Presets are generally hidden away from the end-user because they’reusuallyproperly 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 asCyberpunk 2077, whichkeeps 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 So, the odds are good that the majority of your DLSS-ready games are actually stuck on old, outdated, and subpar builds of the upscaler.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:
Thankfully, 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:
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’rereallypixel-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 isgenerallyconsidered to be the optimal baseline in most cases and a stable default for you to fall back upon if things go awry.
How to change the DLSS Preset?
The best 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 usingEmoose’s DLSSTweaksand 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 June 15, 2025, you actuallycanchange 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’sprobablynot). 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!
