Control your settings with the Nvidia app

NVIDIA GRAPHICS CARD Some games

ACOLYTES OF TEAM GREEN have had an array of GPU-focused software to contend with since GeForce Experience arrived in 2013. It’s the app you’d open to update drivers or optimize the graphics settings of a particular game, but if you wanted to set up G-sync, change digital audio settings, or view the HDCP status of your display, you’d need to open the Nvidia Control Panel.

You’d also need to log in with an Nvidia account just to update your drivers, something that added an extra level of aggravation nobody wanted. Thanks to the new Nvidia app that’s now gone, though there’s now a rewards scheme that requires a login (this can be skipped).

The Nvidia app is more than a reskin of GeForce Experience, though the really granular settings are still hived off in the Control Panel. You get a redesigned interface that offers pergame and global settings for things like VSync and shader cache sizes, as well as driver updates and the ability to switch between Game Ready and Studio drivers. –IAN EVENDEN

1

INSTALLATION

Installing the Nvidia App beta is fairly straightforward. Head to https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/software/nvidia-app and click the big green Download Beta button. It’s worth pointing out that, as the site makes clear, this is beta software, and therefore might be prone to the little niggles that often accompany an app that needs more time in the oven—things like instantly crashing when you open it. If your PC is a crucial part of your workflow, then don’t install this software until the first stable release.

» The installer can take a bit of time to do its thing, and when we thought it had crashed and tried to close it, it provided one of the best error messages we’ve ever seen. It’s rather threatening, with a hint of Terminator about it, and will probably be rewritten by the time the final version of the app becomes available.

2

MEET THE APP

The first thing you’ll see when you open the Nvidia app for the first time is a box asking you to choose between the Game Ready or Studio drivers [ Image A]. They both do the same thing—allow the operating system and apps on your PC to make use of the GPU’s processing capabilities—but the Game Ready driver is the bleeding-edge edition that’s updated most frequently and with specific games in mind. The Studio drivers don’t have this focus on game optimization, but are designed for creative apps, such as 3D rendering or video editing that require stability. It’s possible to run creative apps with Game Ready drivers, as is to run games with Studio drivers. However, in the latter case you’ll be losing out on performance, and in the former you’ll be risking a crash that could cost you time and money.

3

HOME PAGE

With that out of the way, you’ll be on the home page of the app. Unlike the GeForce Experience, the Nvidia app is divided into tabs, which can be switched between on the left-hand side of the interface. It’s a little bit like the Steam app in that it offers ‘shelves’ of content, with rotating news and announcements at the top, some of your commonly played games under that, and links to further Nvidia services below.

» If you’ve upgraded from GeForce Experience, the app retains the scanning locations you set, so should pick up all your installed games. Clicking on a game allows you to either launch it or access its settings, but as before, the game needs to be compatible, and you need to have launched it once to be able to adjust its graphics settings in this way.

4

GAME LOCATIONS

If you’re new to the app, you’ll need to tell it where your games are so it can detect them. Open the Settings tab, and scroll down to Games and Apps. Click View and Modify, and tell the app where your installation folders are for Steam, Uplay, Epic, and all the digital marketplaces you’re signed up for. If you’re only running with one SSD in your rig then this will be a simple process, but if you have a tower with multiple drives then it might take a while to locate them all. The Nvidia app can automatically optimize newly installed games’ settings for your GPU, and you can activate this by sliding the switch next to ‘Automatically optimize newly added games and applications’. This can save time in the game’s settings when you just want to play, but won’t squeeze every last frame of performance from it.

5

OPTIMIZE GAMES

Click ‘See All’ next to the Library shelf on the home page, or on the Graphics tab, and you’ll be taken to a list of all the games the app has found on your PC. From here, you’re able to tweak settings individually, from detail levels and DLSS to VSync and more. Games that are optimized for your rig have a green tick by them, and you’re able to use a slider to choose a happy medium between quality and performance. Perhaps

more interesting is the Global Settings tab, which allows you to set maximum frame rates, shader cache sizes (which can speed up game loading at the expense of SSD space by saving shaders once a game has compiled them), and set whether or not your monitor is G-Sync compatible.

6

THINGS THAT AREN’T GAMES

The Nvidia app will also pick up apps on your PC that aren’t games, but use the GPU. On our test PC, it offered options for OBS Studio, such as the video encoding methods used, and driver settings that were largely covered by the Global Settings

above. It also offered to optimize Adobe Lightroom (whether or not to use the GPU for image processing) and the Topaz AI suite of image processing suites, which make heavy use of the GPU.

7

REWARDS

Nvidia still wants you to have an account, even though it has now decoupled driver updates from it, and the Redeem tab is where you’ll find the ‘rewards’ for this. Oddly, we saw a Call of Duty XP boost reward was active when not logged in, which disappeared when we logged into the app, leaving no rewards at all. This is beta software, however, so perhaps this will be fixed by the time the first stable version is released.

8

NOTIFICATIONS

Open up the Settings tab, and you can set whether or not the app pops up a notification in Windows when there’s a driver update available (very useful) or when there’s a new reward out for you (potentially less useful). It also contains a handy link to Windows’ own notification settings pane [ Image B], from where you can set whether the notifications become part of the general Notification Center, or have their own, more intrusive style like GeForce Experience did, and also set the priority of these messages in the Notification Center stack.