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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)
so why do we need this app again?
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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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...
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.
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They 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.
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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.
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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 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
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.
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.
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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.
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For now, but the plan is to migrate away from it.
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?
Neither of them are as good, especially if you factor in raytracing. DLSS Ray Reconstruction is basically required to not have a noisy image with RTX.
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Use none of them. Embrace funny duck
ROCM works mostly well in replacement of CUDA, and it gets better and better every year
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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!
Me nervously eyeing my 5yr old graphic card...
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.
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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.
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Serious question: what is the benefit of Shadowplay now?
I used to use it for all game recording, but Windows Game Bar and Steam have both implemented that functionality now.
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I already swore off nvidia. My 2080 has been the biggest pain in the ass
How has it been such a pain? I haven’t even thought about my GPU once since I installed it… but I only use regular drivers.
I know people complain about Nvidia and Linux but one of the best parts of my experience with it was never having to deal with GFE. Just a bunch of project managers trying to make themselves useful by shovelling needless slop into your GPU driver.
I used to only use this for game recording. But, it got a glitch where games record with a red tint ever since I upgraded my monitor. Thankfully, every single gaming helper app seems to feature recording now, so I just switched to another.
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Interesting, as DSOgaming got 4-6% in some games, 0% in others.
Dsogaming has barely ever been a reliable source tbh
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