By Jacqueline Thomas
Publication Date: 2026-04-02 17:39:00
Nvidia DLSS has been around since the RTX 2080 dropped back in 2018, but while it started as a way to use machine learning to upscale games, it’s grown to be so much more than that.
Now, 8 years after the Tensor Core that powers DLSS first debuted in Nvidia’s Volta GPU architecture, DLSS will upscale your games, generate entirely new frames, and, when DLSS 5 comes out later this year, will even re-draw each frame in your game. Some of these features are more divisive than others, but it’s hard to argue that DLSS isn’t one of the most important GPU software suites in a while, and is a major part of why Nvidia graphics cards are so good.
DLSS Upscaling
DLSS ostensibly stands for “Deep Learning Super Sampling,” and that’s exactly what it did at the beginning. The whole idea was to render the game at a lower resolution, and then use an AI algorithm, trained on Nvidia super computers and running on Tensor Cores, to accurately upscale to a higher resolution.
For most games, DLSS is available in one of four presets, each changing the scaling factor of the game.
- Ultra Performance: 33%
- Performance: 50%
- Balanced: 58%
- Quality: 66.7%
Obviously, the higher you go up, the better the image quality is going to be, but that will conversely affect your frame rate. As a general rule of thumb, I’d recommend ‘Performance’ for 4K, ‘Balanced’ for 1440p, and ‘Quality’ for 1080p gaming. I personally turn DLSS on whenever I can, but that’s because the algorithm is so good these…
