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We tested the Nvidia App performance problems — games can run up to 15 percent slower with the app
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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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 removed the forced login too. Which was welcome imho. It’s why I tolerate it now. Just for driver updates. I use none of the other features. Sometimes I wish stuff would stay in its lane.
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.
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...
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).
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?
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?
You don't need to update your drivers every time a new version comes out, some games can actually get worse performance with a newer driver - I personally had problems with No Man's Sky, nvidia drivers over version 424 I think, made the game effectively unplayable, while versions like 416 kept the game and the framerate smooth throughout.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I mean, my point is there's no reason they should be overhauling it entirely (at the cost of performance) when they could just pay some competent Windows programmers to un-shit the existing Control Panel. Yeah its UI sucks but it's not going to make you drop frames for just having it open
IIRC the framework it‘s built on is so ancient it didn‘t allow for that, they needed to re-write the whole thing to „fix“ it, and this is what they came up with for that. DF‘s Alex said as much in one of their podcast episodes. All just paraphrased by me of course.
I don‘t think the performance hit is by design or intentional anyway, so hopefully the current screw-up is gonna be a nothing burger by the time the app‘s mandatory (if it ever will be).
I am highly skeptical of that. There are plenty of hobbyists making new things in ancient environments. I just don't think Nvidia has ever been very competent at software engineering (drivers excepted as they're in a very different domain)