Enabling Ultra-Low Latency Mode for NVIDIA Graphics

NVIDIA graphics drivers now offer Ultra-Low Latency mode for competitive players and anyone who wants the fastest input response time in their games. This feature is available for all NVIDIA GeForce GPUs in the NVIDIA Control Panel.

What is the ultra-low latency mode?

The graphics engines queue the images to be rendered by the GPU, which renders them, then they are displayed on your PC. As NVIDIA explains, this feature relies on the "Maximum number of pre-rendered images" feature, present in the NVIDIA Control Panel for over ten years. This allowed you to limit the number of images in the rendering queue.

With "Ultra-Low Latency" mode, images are submitted in the render queue just before the graphics processor needs it. It's "just-in-time planning," as NVIDIA calls it. NVIDIA says it will "continue [reduce] up to 33% latency compared to the use of the option Maximum number of pre-rendered images.

It works with all GPUs. However, this only works with the DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 games. In the DirectX 12 and Vulkan games, "the game decides when to put the frame in queue" and the NVIDIA graphics drivers do not have to play. have no control over that.

At this time, NVIDIA indicates that you may want to use this setting:

"Low latency modes have the most impact when your game is linked to the graphics processor and the measured frame rates are between 60 and 100 FPS, so you can get the responsiveness of a high frame rate game without having to decrease graphic fidelity. "

In other words, if a game is processor-related (limited by your CPU resources instead of your GPU) or if you have very high or very low SPFs, that will not help you too much. If you have input latency in the games (mouse shift, for example), this is often simply because the number of frames per second (FPS) is low, and this setting only solves not the problem.

Warning: This will potentially reduce your FPS. This mode is disabled by default, which, according to NVIDIA, leads to a "maximum rendering rate". For most people, most of the time, it's a better option. However, for competitive multiplayer games, you'll need all the benefits, including lower latency.

How to activate the ultra low latency mode

You will need version 436.02 or later of the NVIDIA graphics driver to take advantage of it. You can update your graphics driver through the GeForce Experience application or download the latest graphics driver directly from the NVIDIA website.

Once you have, launch the NVIDIA Control Panel. To do this, right-click on your Windows desktop and select "NVIDIA Control Panel".

Click "Manage 3D Settings" under 3D Settings in the left sidebar.

Select how to activate Ultra-Low Latency. To enable it for all games on your system, select "Global Settings." To enable it for one or more specific games, select "Program Settings" and then choose the game for which you want to activate it.

Locate "Low Latency Mode" in the list of settings. Click on the adjustment box to the right of the setting and select "Ultra" from the list.

With the default settings of "Off", the game engine will queue one to three frames at a time. The "Enabled" setting forces the game to queue only one frame, which is equivalent to setting Max_Perendered_Frames to 1 in older NVIDIA drivers. The Ultra parameter sends the frame "just in time" for the GPU to retrieve: there will be no frame in the queue and waiting.

Click the "Apply" button to save your settings. You can now close the NVIDIA Control Panel.

Remember, as we pointed out above, that this option can actually hurt performance in many situations! We recommend you only enable it for specific games and test your settings to check its operation.

If you want to cancel your changes and use NVIDIA Graphics Driver's default settings, come back here and click the "Restore" button.