Goodbye, Nvidia GeForce Experience – you were a terrible app and I hated you, but at least something better is coming
There will be very few PC gamers who haven’t encountered GeForce Experience at some point. Nvidia’s GPU companion app has been around for a while at this point, and it’s been a frequent source of frustration for those with RTX (and previously GTX) graphics cards.
These annoyances have been varied, but a handful of consistently frustrating issues have plagued the software for a long time. The dated and sometimes flawed user interface was a common complaint, but users have also complained in the past about issues such as driver installation glitches, security breaches, and mandatory updates.
GeForce Experience was also quite limited overall, with most players simply using it to install the latest drivers and nothing else. And of course, it only required a full login to use it – an absurd requirement considering that GPU drivers are available for manual download online without the need for an account.
Well, PC gamers representing Team Green GPUs can finally celebrate, because GeForce Experience is finally heading to the great server in the sky – and Nvidia is already testing a beta version of a replacement app. Having played with it myself, I’m happy to say it’s a huge step forward.
Bad experiences
The biggest problem with GeForce Experience, in my opinion, has always been how little it offered compared to AMD’s Radeon Adrenalin software and its rich feature set aimed at streamers and hardware tweakers. Sure, some of those missing features can actually be found in the Nvidia Control Panel, but the newly designed Nvidia app brings everything under one roof with a pleasantly modern and easy-to-navigate user interface.
The extended functionality here is – from my short time testing the new app on Computerex 2024 last week – maybe not 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 never needs to touch.
One feature I particularly liked was the automatic overclocking option, which essentially scans your entire system and then sets the default overclocking for your GPU and VRAM to boost performance without having to mess around in the BIOS. It’s these kinds of user-friendly features that Nvidia should focus on with future updates to the Nvidia app – functionality that will make your games run better while minimizing the amount of work the user has to do.
Most importantly, the Nvidia app doesn’t require any kind of login and (from what I’ve seen so far) is a lot smoother to open and use straight away compared to GeForce Experience or the Nvidia Control Panel.
You can try out the new Nvidia app now by downloading it from Nvidia’s website – and while Nvidia notes that users may experience some instability in this beta version of the app, I’ve had no issues at all while testing it. As an added bonus, GeForce Experience is even uninstalled for you during installation – good riddance, I’d say!