344
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
344 points (100.0% liked)
Games
37659 readers
2563 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here and here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
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.
What's the difference? And is this OS specific?
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.
GFE's only useful purpose is for ShadowPlay. Use Nvcleanstall instead to update your drivers. That way you can remove unnecessary features and stop the privacy-invading telemetry.
load more comments
(3 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
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.
Ray tracing*
RTX is a brand.
Regardless, given the performance impact and how few games actually have ray tracing (implemented correctly), it makes more sense to just disregard ray tracing altoghether.
It's an undercooked technology used to push more expensive products, nothing more.
Regarding dlss vs fsr and xess, yes dlss has better quality but it's also proprietary so I honestly do not care about it. Just like gsync died, dlss will eventually die as well.
Just like gsync died
(true) gsync isn't dead, it's only in the highest end of monitors which is basically where it's always been. It only "died" because it requires an expensive module vs adaptive sync being built into basically every modern display controller so it's basically free.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Use none of them. Embrace funny duck
ROCM works mostly well in replacement of CUDA, and it gets better and better every year
I thought I was happy I went AMD until my card started overrunning its fans for no reason a month after the warranty ran out. I manually had to reseat the card on the PCIe for it to stop because nothing else would, not even restarting the PC. And then one day it heated up so bad it stopped working. I think they gave me a defective card on purpose because people are less likely to return the items when they're buying from outside the US.
I've since gone back to Nvidia and my current card hasn't given me any issues. What a nightmare that was.
I swear that in my 20+ years of computer work that everyone has a story like this for every brand out there. It seems to literally be bad luck. That being said some companies just have abysmal and evil support ethics. And these days it seems all of them are trying to dial in the device failure to happen after the warranty expires.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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!
Me nervously eyeing my 5yr old graphic card...
And the bigger the number on one of the components in the box the funnier the game!
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.
load more comments
(6 replies)
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.
load more comments
(2 replies)
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Interesting, as DSOgaming got 4-6% in some games, 0% in others.
Dsogaming has barely ever been a reliable source tbh
I already swore off nvidia. My 2080 has been the biggest pain in the ass
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)