so why do we need this app again?
It’s replacing the old Nvidia control panel
It’s replacing GeForce Experience. The nVidia Control Panel is still around.
The cost of having to have an account to get “easy” driver updates always seemed a bit high to begin with. I never really found its game optimization profiles to be useful either.
Yeah I disable those back when I noticed World of Warcraft started performing badly. GFE had helpfully optimised it to run at a resolution 4x higher than my screen and downscaled it…
The profiles can be nice for setting most things, but having it default all of your games to Fullscreen instead of Borderless Windowed (and no way to change what the default setting is anywhere in the program) should be fucking criminalized.
What’s the difference? And is this OS specific?
There’s TechPowerUp’s NVCleanstall, it has semi automatic drivers updates with a lot of granularity (though the latest version needs an update due to this new app).
IIRC their plan is to get rid of the control panel once they‘ve carried all its functionality over to the app.
I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed
Tbh, the control panel is a lot of things, but responsive or slick aren‘t one of them. As long as they carry all the functionality over and get rid of the bugs, I‘m happy with the app. Unless they pull a fast one and add account requirements in again later.
So it can be ignored, like GeForce Experience?
No, it should be uninstalled.
Serious question from someone who only recently moved to PC gaming: Why can it be ignored? Isn’t that where you get the latest drivers? Or are you downloading and installing them manually?
A driver allows games to interface with the graphics hardware, enabling accelerated performance for example. This “app” provides additional functionality on top of that (I don’t know what, but GeForce Experience it replaces provided things like recording gameplay videos etc.) which is not strictly required and, it seems, hurts gaming performance.
As for getting the latest drivers, you can do it manually by going to nVidia’s website and download them, or rely on Windows update to give you reasonably recent drivers.
You can download them manually if you want. Updated drivers is rarely that important for performance. Maybe for newer games, but not for 98% of what’s already out there.
And they also mess things up occasionally. Like all those Minecraft performance mods that had to change how the game looked to the driver, because if it looked like Minecraft it’d tune itself and get worse performance instead of better.
Some years ago, when I was still using windows, I used to run https://www.techpowerup.com/nvcleanstall/ instead to update drivers. Still recommend it to this day.
Another issue linux gamers don’t have nowdays
For now, but the plan is to migrate away from it.
GFE was terrible because it always forgot my login and fuck if I’m going to remember a password just to update drivers.
At least they’ve done away with that bit.
Getting ready to “motivate” people to get the 5xxx series because the current cards “have issues now”. The more you buy the more you save!
And the bigger the number on one of the components in the box the funnier the game!
Damn I’m happy I went AMD.
it is hard if you rely on CUDA and DLSS.
Damn I’m happy I don’t rely on CUDA or DLSS
How can you “rely” on DLSS when you can easily use XeSS or FSR?
That‘s certainly something they‘re gonna want to fix. I hope DF and GN pick up on this, seems like free views and I‘d love to hear what they‘ve got to say on the matter.
Edit: Also wondering if it‘s the app or if the performance hit disappears when you disable the overlay. Only flew over the article to see what games are affected how badly so mb if that’s mentioned.
Edit 2:
HUB‘s Tim tested it and found that it‘s the overlay or rather the game filter portion of the overlay causing the performance hit. You can disable this part of the overlay in the app‘s settings, or disable the overlay altogether.
He also found that this feature wasn’t impacting performance on GeForce Experience, so it’s very likely a bug that’s gonna be fixed.
To clarify: Using game filters actively can have an impact on either, but right now even when not actively using them, they cause a performance hit just by the functionality being enabled; a bug.
The only outlier where just having the app installed hit performance was the Harry Potter game.
Yeah they didn’t test that. Nor did they test having the app installed but not running. Crummy article tbh.
Disagree, and i don’t think it’s the point.
As an average user, why am I paying a performance hit for nvidia’s own “recommended parameters”
That’s trash and a terrible experience, and they should be called out for it.
Let me guess… It uses CFE or Electron?
Yep, uses CEF, though many popular desktop apps do without much perf impact.
It’s not CEF that does most of the impact. It’s the contents web devs make it load and process. And web devs generally not being very competent in optimizing is just a sad reality.
I already swore off nvidia. My 2080 has been the biggest pain in the ass
Interesting, as DSOgaming got 4-6% in some games, 0% in others.
Dsogaming has barely ever been a reliable source tbh