NVIDIA App
Configure your NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU and game graphics settings with the NVIDIA App
Last updated
Configure your NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU and game graphics settings with the NVIDIA App
Last updated
The NVIDIA App is a powerful companion tool for owners of NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. This application replaces the GeForce Experience app that used to be installed with the NVIDIA GeForce driver. Designed for gamers and creators alike, this app brings an array of features to help you maximize performance, customize graphics settings, and optimize your system for a smoother, more immersive experience.
The NVIDIA App was originally announced in beta on February 22nd, 2024. Let's explore some of the features of the NVIDIA App below.
Keeping your GPU drivers up to date is essential for optimal performance and compatibility, especially with new game releases. The NVIDIA App simplifies this with its Driver Updates feature, which notifies you of new driver releases and allows you to update easily.
You can click the drop down box in the top-right and select which type of driver you want.
There's two different versions of NVIDIA driver available. Most users stick to Game Ready Drivers, which are optimized for the latest games, rather than Studio Drivers, which are aimed at creators and offer stability for software like Adobe Premiere and Autodesk. The NVIDIA App will let you know when a new NVIDIA driver is available, so you don't have to go hunt on the website to download and install it.
On the graphics section of the NVIDIA App , you can see a list of games and other applications that utilize your Nvidia GPU. You can use the NVIDIA App to tweak the settings of each application, to control the behavior of your GPU while that application is running. When you launch games from a game launcher like Steam or Epic Games store, the applications will automatically show up in the NVIDIA App.
Some games have a green Optimize button that will automatically configure the recommended settings for that title. If you've customized some graphics options and want to go back to the recommended settings, this is a handy shortcut.
The NVIDIA App is "smart" and knows the in-game settings for each of your games that you've launched. For example, in Final Fantasy VII Remake, you can see the following in-game graphics options:
Display Mode
Resolution
Shadows Resolution
Texture Resolution
Other games offer many more detailed graphics settings, such as Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3). There are tons of unique, in-game graphics settings that you can choose from in BG3. Some of those settings include:
Animation Level of Detail
Cloud Quality
Detail Distance
Dynamic Crowds
Fog Quality
God Rays
Instance Distance
Model Quality
Subsurface Scattering
The NVIDIA App also provides a System Details section. There are several tabs under this area of the app: Overview, Performance, Displays, Video.
The Overview section shows some of the essential details about your system hardware, operating system, and NVIDIA driver version that's currently active. It includes info about your attached storage devices (SSDs and hard drives), and the monitors connected to your NVIDIA GPU.
The next tab over is the Performance tab. This area allows you to see the details of your NVIDIA GPU, such as the current clock speed, power consumption (watts), GPU die temperature, voltage, utilization percentage, and fan speed. We recommend leaving these options alone for most people, unless you want to stress test your NVIDIA GeForce GPU. You can manually configure your GPU fan speed on this screen, if you want to crank it up to the max and test how loud it is, for example.
The Power Maximum option allows you to limit how much wattage your GPU consumes. If you're doing some desktop work, but don't want your GPU to be highly utilized, you can crank this down a fair amount. This will help avoid your GPU drawing lots of power, getting hotter, and spinning up the fans.
On the next Displays tab, you can see the monitors attached to your NVIDIA GPU. In this screenshot, you can see that I have three 4k monitors attached to my system. Each of them is from a different manufacturer and model. Only the center monitor supports G-Sync, so there's a toggle available to turn G-Sync on or off. For high refresh rate LCD panels, such as the KTC 27" 4k 144hz HDR LCD, you can select a specific Refresh Rate from the drop-down list, such as 120Hz, 144Hz, or 160Hz. If your monitor is able to physically rotate into a vertical orientation, you can select the display orientation at the bottom of this screen.
The last tab in the System section of the NVIDIA App is the Video tab. There's only two settings here at the moment: RTX Video Super Resolution (VSR) and High Dynamic Range (HDR). There aren't many applications that support VSR, but you might want to take a look at MPV. This will attempt to enhance the quality of video playback in certain applications that support it. As of this writing, VLC unfortunately doesn't seem to support the VSR feature. There's also an RTX HDR option that will attempt to enhance Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) video to HDR, using an AI model in the NVIDIA software. If you don't have an HDR LCD monitor, this option won't do anything for you.
The last section of the NVIDIA App worth discussing is the Settings area.
On the Features tab, you can enable or disable the NVIDIA App overlay in games, which helps you to capture screenshots and record videos, using the ALT+Z keyboard shortcut. You can also toggle the option to auto-download new NVIDIA drivers, and notify you to invoke the installation of them.
The Notifications tab is where you can check a box to send a Windows notification when a new driver update is available.
Finally, the About tab is where you can opt into data sharing for game crashes, performance issues, game configuration settings, and so on. We would recommend opting into the optional data sharing, to help the NVIDIA development team fix as many issues as they can.
We highly recommend enabling the Configuration, performance, and usage data and the Error and crash data options. By enabling these options, you will be contributing important data that NVIDIA needs to improve the GeForce device drivers. While a lot of people will opt out of data sharing, developers really need this kind of data to help them figure out where to invest their time to improve the customer experience.
