Marvel Rivals Config Paks: What Happened To Them

Config paks are retired. They were .pak files that carried engine settings into Marvel Rivals, the app shipped three of them under the names Standard, Potato and Ultra Potato, and version 4.0.0 removed the feature outright. There is no Config Editor, no compliance check, and nothing writes a settings pak into the game any more. The three names did come back in version 4.1.0, on a completely different mechanism: they are NVIDIA driver presets in the Quality tab now, and that tab needs an NVIDIA graphics card.

If you came here to work out which one to run, that is the answer: none of them, because none of them is a pak any more. The job they did, lowering what the game has to draw, is split across three places now: graphic packs, the six layer settings that sit above them, and the Quality tab, which handles texture filtering through the NVIDIA driver and needs an NVIDIA graphics card. The rest of this page is where that moved to.

What a config pak was

A packaged set of engine settings the game read at startup. Its main lever was internal render resolution, which it could push below the floor the in-game menu allows: Standard ran at 80%, Potato at 50%, and Ultra Potato at 30%. One was active at a time, a Config Editor let you tune the values by hand, and a compliance check ran before anything installed.

All of that is gone from the app, not hidden behind a toggle. If you are still on an older version you will see the tab until the app updates itself at launch, and after that it will not be there.

The three names came back, on a different mechanism

Version 4.1.0 added a rail tab called Quality, sitting between Mods and Graphics, and it carries the same three names: Ultra Potato, Potato and Standard, biggest gain first. They are not config paks and not paks of any kind. Nothing is written into the game folder and no engine setting is edited. The tab writes Marvel Rivals' own per-game profile in the NVIDIA driver, which is why it needs an NVIDIA graphics card. On AMD and Intel the tab still opens and says why it cannot work there: AMD's driver has no equivalent for DirectX 12 games, so in-game low settings plus FSR stay the answer on those cards.

It lasts one launch. You arm a tier in the tab, the app writes it when you press the Launch button there, and it is put back when the game closes. Starting the game any other way runs stock, and nothing else on the PC changes.

In our own benchmarks the gain was moderate, around 3 percent more FPS on a high-end card with Ultra Potato. Cards with less VRAM and lower-end GPUs typically gain more, and most of it shows up in the 1% lows, meaning less stutter, rather than in headline FPS.

There are cosmetic artifacts at the harsher tiers. Ultra Potato can turn some floors invisible on a few maps, Potato leaves a few of them slightly raised, and Standard keeps every map intact.

What lowers the render load now

Graphic packs. A pack replaces the map and environment textures with simpler ones, and the app is plain about what that buys you: faster map and environment textures, an FPS boost that replaces what the game draws. It is not free, because you are looking at different surfaces afterwards, but the gain is real and you can see exactly what you traded for it.

Nothing downloads. Every pack is compiled on your own PC out of your own game files, which is also why you can build your own and have it behave like the shipped ones. One pack is active at a time, the same way one config pak used to be.

Above the library sit six selects: Foliage Style, Foliage Res, Visual Effects, Characters, Decals and Shadows. Each has presets named Default, Competitive, Balanced and Pretty, so the whole strip can be set in one move or tuned layer by layer. Changes stage as a draft and go on with a single Apply, and where a layer covers the same textures as your pack, the layer wins.

That is the part worth understanding, because it is more precise than a config pak ever was. A resolution drop softened the entire image at once. Here you decide which parts of the picture get simplified, and foliage, effects and shadows are usually where the frames are hiding. The full walkthrough is in graphic pack settings, and the packs themselves are covered in graphic packs.

If you want frames without changing how the game looks

Then the packs are the wrong tab, and so is Quality: it needs an NVIDIA graphics card, and its harsher tiers blur textures, which is the trade it makes. Windows Optimizations holds 14 OS-level tweaks across network, system, GPU, power and input, every one of them reversible, with Revert All to undo the set. They touch Windows rather than the game, so nothing about the image changes. Start with the Windows optimizations guide, and how to increase FPS in Marvel Rivals covers the in-game settings that matter alongside them.

Getting rid of an old one

A config pak you installed through an older version of the app is just a file on disk now. Revert All Changes, in Settings, undoes what the app installed. If the pak ended up in the game's ~mods folder it will be listed in the Mod Manager, where you can switch it off without deleting it or remove it outright.

Once it is gone, set a graphic pack and pick a layer preset. That is the current path to the same result, and it is the one the app maintains.

Common questions