2025 will mark ten years since I worked in the tech industry. In that time, I’ve created and documented hundreds of custom PC builds and benchmarked hundreds of other products, each time installing a new operating system on every system I use – and that doesn’t include reinstalls on my own installations.
I can tell you now that nothing infuriated me more at the time than GeForce Experience. That may sound like a hyperbolic statement to just launch an opinion piece like this, but seriously: it was a program that only became more complicated, less useful, and overall more difficult to deal with. over the years. With the app being retired this year and replaced by the Nvidia app, I was cautiously tired at first, but soon found myself filled with joy.
Why the big problem with Nvidia’s GeForce Experience (GFE)? Well, mostly it just felt a bit dingy. When GFE was first introduced, it was simple enough: just a desktop program that suggested some settings for games (which I would promptly ignore), along with update recommendations to use new drivers (advanced stuff), oh, and ShadowPlay , which, let’s face it, was largely written off by gamers.
Over time, GFE changed and required an Nvidia account to log in. Why? Good question. I still don’t know, and nothing was transferred from machine to machine with that login, nor was any personal information stored in the app. So, Nvidia, why did I have to log in? That remains a mystery.
Then came the captcha – good grief, the captcha. Select the squares with the traffic lights in them. Great, thanks. Does the pole count as a traffic light? That square also has the corner of a traffic light – does that count? Error, please try again (argh).
Finally, the email notification to log in came instead, perhaps resulting in a dramatic improvement. Everything for a driver update notification. Fantastic.
How bad has it gotten? I have actively advised pretty much everyone in the PC gaming world not to install GFE on machines. I treated it exactly the same way I reserve for third-party antivirus software – just don’t do it, it’s not worth it. I’ve never installed GFE on my own rigs, that’s for sure. After every build I completed or update I performed on my own PCs, I would go straight to Nvidia’s website, download the drivers directly and install them without installing GeForce Experience, with the occasional glance at a new driver every month or so. Life was good.
Then I got a chance to check out AMD’s Adrenalin software, and boy, oh boy, was I impressed. From stats to settings to driver updates, it worked, it was (and still is) incredible. How could Nvidia sleep on a wealth of features while the competition (which is particularly struggling with GPU market share) was doing such a good job with its app?
GeForce Experience and Nvidia Control Panel in one
With the launch of the Nvidia app (what a name, guys – I killed it) and the death of GeForce Experience, as mentioned, I was nervous at first, but then quickly became excited. This was everything I wanted in a decent GPU control app. It almost feels weird to say this, but it was great to see Team Green finally catch up to AMD.
The Nvidia app not only made the most of the GeForce Experience (what little there was), but also took the ridiculously outdated Windows XP-like Nvidia Control Panel, and added some of the most used features to it as well. Everything brought together in a nice little package that fortunately does not require a login. Or a captcha! (Although you can log in if you want, but I’m not sure why you would).
In almost any scenario, the Nvidia app is a major upgrade. Driver updates and notifications, check. Graphics settings for games (for those who don’t like tinkering with settings), check this. Monitor the control options, check. There’s even stuff in there to overclock your GPU and check in-game stats. Nice.
There’s still a link to that old-school Control Center for those who want to adjust finer details (if you’re a weirdo who needs to adjust the monitor’s color settings, for example, or the other fine-grained 3D settings), but that’s not the end of it the world.
However, the Nvidia app is not flawless and there is still room for improvement. Head to the Home tab and you’ll find links to Nvidia Broadcast, ICAT, FrameView and GeForce Now. They act as sublinks, pushing you to a download page or opening the program directly from there, but full integration would seriously make the Nvidia app more powerful.
At this point, Nvidia has only just overtaken AMD (it still feels really weird to say that), and there’s nothing here that really sets this app apart from the crowd. It’s a nice update for the people who already work at Nvidia, but that’s all there is to it. The Nvidia app doesn’t push the boundaries of what can be done with it. Still, I think we should all be grateful that those damn traffic lights are gone, at least for now.
And that’s actually the concern. Maybe Team Green finally realized it wasn’t getting as many signups as it used to on GeForce Experience. That we good PC people completely dodged the bullet and opted to download just the bare bones graphics driver, without the weird green little add-on package in tow. Maybe this is all just a cunning ploy to get us to download this shiny new thing, with a few extra bonuses, and then, six months later, boom: Log in please, oh, and identify these bikes while you’re at it. Wrong! Please try again.