NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards are some of the most popular in the market, and they come with a variety of features that make them perfect for gaming. One of the most popular features is Ultra-Low Latency Mode, or ULM. ULM allows gamers to play games at a much lower frame rate than normal, which can improve performance and save on battery life. To enable ULM on your graphics card, you first need to create a new NVIDIA GeForce driver profile. To do this, open the GeForce Control Panel and click on the “Device Manager” tab. Under “Driver Version”, find the “NVIDIA GeForce” driver and click on it. In the “Description” field, find the following: In this section, you will find information about how to enable ULM on your graphics card. The first step is to identify which game you want to play at a lower frame rate. This can be done by looking at the “Game Type” field in the “Description” field and finding one of NVIDIA’s many games that support ULM. Once you have found a game that supports ULM, follow these steps:

  1. Open up that game and start playing it at a lower frame rate than usual. This will help improve performance and save battery life!
  2. If you want to keep playing after completing step 1), close out of that game and open up another one that supports ULM. This way, you can continue playing even if your original game crashes or goes out of range for your graphics card!

What Is Ultra-Low Latency Mode?

Graphics engines queue frames to be rendered by the GPU, the GPU renders them, and then they’re displayed on your PC.  As NVIDIA explains, this feature builds on the “Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames” feature that’s been found in the NVIDIA Control Panel for over a decade. That allowed you to keep the number of frames in the render queue down.

With “Ultra-Low Latency” mode, frames are submitted into the render queue just before the GPU needs them. This is “just in time frame scheduling,” as NVIDIA calls it. NVIDIA says it will “further [reduce] latency by up to 33%” over just using the Maximum Pre-Rendered Frames option.

This works with all GPUs. However, it only works with DirectX 9 and DirectX 11 games. In DirectX 12 and Vulkan games, “the game decides when to queue the frame” and the NVIDIA graphics drivers have no control over this.

Here’s when NVIDIA says you might want to use this setting:

In other words, if a game is CPU bound (limited by your CPU resources instead of your GPU) or you have very high or very low FPS, this won’t help too much. If you have input latency in games—mouse lag, for example—that’s often simply a result of low frames per second (FPS) and this setting won’t solve that problem.

How to Enable Ultra-Low Latency Mode

You’ll need version 436.02 or newer of the NVIDIA graphics driver to take advantage of this. You can update your graphics driver through the GeForce Experience application or download the latest graphics driver directly from NVIDIA’s website.

Once you have, launch the NVIDIA Control Panel. To do so, right-click your Windows desktop and select “NVIDIA Control Panel.”

Click “Manage 3D Settings” under 3D Settings in the left sidebar.

Select how you want to enable Ultra-Low Latency Mode. 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 choose the game you want to enable it for.

Locate “Low Latency Mode” in the list of settings. Click the setting box to the right of the setting and select “Ultra” in the list.

With the default settings of “Off,” the game’s engine will queue one to three frames at a time. The “On” setting will force the game to only queue a single frame, which is the same as setting Max_Prerendered_Frames to 1 in older NVIDIA drivers. The Ultra setting submits the frame “just in time” for the GPU to pick it up—there will be no frame sitting 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, this option can actually hurt performance in many situations! We recommend enabling it only for specific games and testing your settings to see how well it actually works.

If you want to undo your changes and use the NVIDIA graphics driver’s default settings, return here and click the “Restore” button.