Nvidia’s mod runtime gives Blackwell Ultra by default. RTX Spark gets Medium.

Nvidia’s RTX Remix runtime now recognises RTX Spark and hands it Medium graphics settings and DLSS at its Performance setting by default. The change arrived in a commit titled “Apply RTX Spark defaults for Auto graphics settings”, written by an author with an nvidia.com address at 18:15:58 UTC on October 9 and read at 21:48 UTC on October 10.

Nvidia’s own code comment says the core count differs between RTX Spark SKUs, which is why detection ignores it. Image: Nvidia

Nvidia wrote the documentation for it in the same commit, and the sentence is flat: “On RTX Spark, Auto graphics selection defaults to Medium, and Auto DLSS selection defaults to Performance. Per-GPU graphics and DLSS overrides take precedence over these defaults.” The runtime logs the decision as “RTX Spark detected, setting default graphics settings to Medium”.

The ladder it steps around ends at Ultra

The runtime had a way of guessing before this. When the graphics preset is set to Auto, the runtime reads the GPU architecture and picks from a ladder written into the same file: Turing gets Low, Ampere gets Medium, Ada gets High, and Blackwell gets Ultra, each with a log line of its own. Cards from other vendors get Low, and…