After nearly a year of public beta honing, the Nvidia App – Team Green’s new one-stop shop for desktop GPU management – is out in full. Not alongside the upcoming RTX 50 series, as rumoured, but right-now-today-this-minute. I’ve been testing out the launch version and while it’s not without some dud features, it does agreeably achieve its stated goal of combining the functions within Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience. And if installing it means never having to use the latter again, well, that’s 149MB well spent.
If you’ve somehow managed to run a GeForce graphics card without ever using the Nvidia App’s constituent parts, essentially, Nvidia Control Panel houses a bunch of hardware-focused settings (including G-Sync) while GeForce Experience juggles everything from a driver update tool and per-game performance settings to a Xbox Game Bar-style overlay that commands various game capture modes. GeForce Experience sounds like more fun but it’s always been the fussier child, with a blocky overlay UI that looks like it was designed for touchscreens and a nonsensical login requirement that means you can’t even update your drivers without forking over an email address.
The Nvidia App, mercifully, makes no such demands, and is altogether a better utility than either of its predecessors. Its merging of display, GPU, and game-specific settings into one tool is both a sensible and well-executed endeavour, with usability improvements throughout; the Program Settings menu, for instance, cuts straight to the game settings, as opposed to how GeForce Experience buries them beneath a gigantic (and gigantically pointless) screenshot gallery.
The redesigned in-game overlay also shows the value of going back to basics, consolidating all those disparate boxes into a single, clean-looking sidebar menu – which still manages to fit in a full set of visible shortcut reminders.
The driver update section has been polished up too, with at-a-glance info on the most recent version’s big changes and bug fixes. I like that there’s a one-click Reinstall button as well, even if I’d ideally never need to use it.
Downsides? I’m not overly keen on the app’s front page trying to flog me a bunch of Nvidia’s AI products (though some of the other advertised tools, like ICAT and FrameView, can be genuinely useful). The overlay, too, seems like it’s just as prone as GeForce Experience’s to clashing with other games utilities – MSI Afterburner, for example, lost its screenshotting and benchmarking capabilities after I opened the Nvidia overlay a single time. There’s also a question of how useful its capture tools actually are, now that Steam has its own, rather nifty Game Recording feature.
I also wouldn’t expect too much of Automatic Tuning, the Nvidia App’s new easy-overclock tool. This starts off with a lengthy scan of your PC’s hardware – over twenty minutes, in my case, and with repeated, unidentified “interruptions” forcing three separate attempts – before lightly boosting the GPU’s clock speed and memory. The good news is that it doesn’t go nuts, burning your expensive graphics card inside a giant wicker mid-tower as a sacrifice to the framerate gods. The bad news is that it’s so cautious, the applied overlock is unlikely to achieve much. In the games I tested, only Total War: Warhammer III got a proportionally significant speed boost from Automatic Tuning, and even then it’s one you might struggle to notice with naked eyes.
Ah well. Personally I can live with ignoring features as long as they’re tacked onto something more utilitarian, and the Nvidia App’s no-login driver updates and integrated menus make it a clear improvement on having to swap between NCP and the glorified data collector that is GeForce Experience.