There will be precious few PC gamers out there who haven't had to deal with GeForce Experience at some point. Nvidia’s GPU companion app has been kicking around for quite a while at this point, and it's been a frequent source of frustration for those with RTX (and previously GTX) graphics cards.
These irritations were varied, but a handful of consistently frustrating problems have long plagued the software. The dated and sometimes buggy UI was a common complaint, but users also historically complained about issues such as driver install malfunctions, security breaches, and mandatory updates.
GeForce Experience was also just generally quite limited, with most players simply using it to install the latest drivers and nothing else. And of course, it required a full login just to use it – an absurd requirement given that GPU drivers are available to download manually online without needing any sort of account.
Well, PC gamers repping Team Green GPUs can finally celebrate, because GeForce Experience is finally headed for the great server in the sky – and Nvidia is already testing out a beta version of a replacement app. Having played about with it myself, I'm pleased to say that it's an enormous step forward.
Bad Experiences
GeForce Experience’s main problem, in my opinion, was always how little it offered in comparison to AMD’s Radeon Adrenalin software and its rich feature set geared towards streamers and hardware tweakers. Sure, some of those missing features could actually be found in the Nvidia Control Panel, but the newly-designed Nvidia App will bring everything under one roof with a pleasingly modern and easy-to-navigate UI.
The expanded functionality here is – from my short time testing out the new app at Computex 2024 last week – perhaps not quite as in-depth as what Adrenalin offers, but all the important stuff is there. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that AMD’s app has a handful of options that the average user will never need to touch.
One feature that I particularly liked was the auto-overclock option, which essentially scans your entire system and then sets default overclocks for your GPU and VRAM to improve performance without the need to mess about in the BIOS. It’s this sort of ease-of-use feature that Nvidia should focus on with the Nvidia App’s future updates – functionality that makes your games run better while also minimizing the amount of work the user has to do.
Most importantly, the Nvidia App doesn’t require any sort of login and (from what I’ve seen so far) is a lot smoother to open and use instantly compared to either GeForce Experience or the Nvidia Control Panel.
You can try out the new Nvidia App right now by downloading it from Nvidia’s website – and while Nvidia notes that users may experience some instability in this beta build of the app, I had no issues at all while testing it out. As an added bonus, it even uninstalls GeForce Experience for you during setup – good riddance, I say!
