Lossless Scaling is a fantastic tool that can help when your GPU can’t handle certain workloads. It also helps out in games that don’t support DLSS, FSR, or XeSS. Most importantly, it’s cheap, and it works with any graphics card. But despite all those positives, it’s not quite a full-on replacement for vendor-specific software, and it can run into various problems.

If you’ve tried using LS and felt underwhelmed, or even disappointed, by the result, you’re not alone. Fortunately, you might be able to tweak some settings to get some solid performance out of LS. Here’s what I recommend looking into.

Lossless Scaling may look bad through no fault of its own

It’s not a magic wand

Although my GPU has access to DLSS 4.5, I spent a lot of time playing around with Lossless Scaling. More often than not, the results were great, but sometimes, all I was met with was disappointment. It’s not even that the frame gen aspect of it all didn’t work; it usually did, but sometimes, the artifacts and the stuttering and the latency made it all so not worth it.

I’m not surprised. It does make sense.

One of the biggest misconceptions about Lossless Scaling is that it can somehow clean up a bad image while also making it smoother. It cannot. If the game looks messy before you introduce any upscaling or frame gen, or if your frame rates are especially bad, then no tool can fix that entirely; especially not a tool that works on a GPU level instead of directly affecting the game with full support from its developers.

That is why a bad LS result is often not really an LS problem. In a lot of cases, the app is simply exposing issues that were already there, such as shimmering, ugly sharpening, unstable frame pacing, or a soft image produced by an aggressive in-game upscaler.

Display mode matters, too. LS is built around windowed and borderless fullscreen use, so if a game is behaving strangely in fullscreen, that’s not that odd.

If LS looks wrong right away, I would first simplify the image pipeline, run the game in borderless, strip back the extra visual effects, and make sure I am not piling one reconstruction method on top of another.

Poor results are often caused by bad base fps

Fake smoothness still needs real frames

Credit: Monica J. White/How-To Geek

LS is no different from other frame generation tools in the sense that it can’t perform miracles. If your GPU is running the game at 20 fps, it can’t suddenly balloon to a smooth 200 fps without any issues. As such, a lot of Lossless Scaling problems start before generated frames even appear.

The official guidance is that you need a base fps of around 30 fps at 1080p, but 40 fps is preferred, and 60 fps is ideal. Of course, if you’re already running the game at a steady 60 fps, you may not even need frame gen in the first place, but most monitors can support higher frame rates these days.

If your game is hovering too low, or the frame rate is not steady, LS can make it look smoother on paper, but it still gets stuttery or oddly laggy in motion. It honestly feels worse than just playing at lower fps to begin with.

Not all settings mean the same thing

LS may run differently across devices and games

Credit: Sydney Louw Butler / How-To Geek

That is why the first thing I would do is cap the base framerate and make sure it stays stable. Lossless Scaling explicitly recommends locking the game’s framerate to avoid pegging the GPU at 100%, which helps both latency and frame pacing, and that lines up with the biggest real-world fixes too. In practice, a locked 60 fps base usually feels far better than an uncapped framerate that swings between, say, 48 and 72, even if the latter looks better in a benchmark overlay.

If artifacts or lag get worse once you start running frame gen, I would also avoid being too ambitious with the multiplier in LS. X2 is the safest starting point, and you should only scale up if your GPU and the game are both stable at that point. If your GPU is already working too hard, try Performance Mode or lower Flow Scale instead of pushing for a higher multiplier.

Adaptive Frame Generation can also help, but only in the right scenario. It’s useful when your base fps doesn’t really line up with your display’s refresh rates, but it can increase GPU load and cut back on image quality, so it’s not something I’d enable by default. And if your base frame rate is unstable no matter what, bumping Queue Target from the default of 1 to 2 can smooth things out … although that comes at the cost of more latency, so yeah. You’ll need to pick your poison here.

Find the settings that work for you

You can often achieve better results

Credit: Tim Rattray / How-To Geek

Beyond Lossless Scaling itself, you can also try to tweak a few game-level settings before you write it off. Run the game in borderless or windowed mode, with a frame cap, and check for additional background fps limits inside the game itself. As always when talking about fps issues, I recommend disabling ray tracing and path tracing when troubleshooting.

On the PC side, in Windows 11, enable Optimizations for windowed games. That can be huge. After that, if the colors look off, test HDR or Auto HDR off to rule out a bad HDR interaction.

It’s always worth a try

Not every issue with Lossless Scaling is fixable. Ultimately, you’ll get the best results by either not using frame generation at all or relying on vendor-specific tools like DLSS. But LS can come in handy in a pinch, so give it a solid 15 minutes of focused troubleshooting before you write it off. After that, if your GPU’s own software can’t help, it’s either a new graphics card, a lower resolution, or lower settings.

Graphics RAM Size

12GB

Boost Clock Speed

2600MHz

If Lossless Scaling didn’t help and all else fails, you might have to think about buying a new GPU. The RTX 5070 makes for a good option with some solid future-proofing and a reliable base for frame generation to perform its magic.