Introduction

NVIDIA App was just declared to be out of beta, making it an official component of the NVIDIA GeForce driver package. The app was first released as a public beta in February 2024, as a standalone utility separate from the driver package which you had to download separately. NVIDIA App acts like a new front-end utility targeting both gamers and creators using GeForce graphics cards—eventually it will replace the legacy Control Panel and GeForce Experience. While a device's driver is system software that works in the background, you need some kind of software to control and adjust settings. Most drivers have minimalist Control Panel utilities to configure devices, but a graphics card is a very versatile device performing the all-important task of accelerating 3D graphics. There's lot to configure based on what display hardware you have.

The very first control panel utilities for GPU drivers were just that—tools to configure basic things like resolution and color settings. Over the years, you could get access to more settings, but it is only in the past 15 years-ish, that the need arose for the graphics driver to come with a software that gave gamers and content creators not just hardware configuration, but the ability to optimize software and games to the hardware, to keep the settings persistent. NVIDIA to this day has the NVIDIA Control Panel, a classic Win32 application to configure the driver and a bunch of display-related settings. In the 2010s, the company debuted GeForce Experience, a utility that it bundled with its GeForce driver package, which does pretty much everything the NVIDIA App does.



So, why NVIDIA App when there's GeForce Experience, and what's next for the latter? NVIDIA released GeForce Experience with the same good intentions as it did the NVIDIA App—to serve as a front-end to its drivers, and make its hardware an increasingly software-defined device (the modern GPU is a superscalar SIMD accelerator, so go figure), however, some gamers grew weary with it, particularly its need to create an online account with NVIDIA—a requirement that was later removed—amid allegations that GeForce Experience was gathering telemetry. The GeForce driver installer comes with the option to upfront prevent the installation of GeForce Experience.

The NVIDIA App hence is an attempt by NVIDIA to start over with a new clean-slate application that does away with much of the bulk GeForce Experience gathered over the years, being a lightweight new way to configure your NVIDIA hardware, to act as a configuration utility for your games and applications, and keep your driver software up-to-date. NVIDIA App comes with a modern new user interface that's more minimalistic and easier to navigate. You now know you're dealing with a utility your graphics card came with, and not a takeover launcher that makes your entire PC gaming experience about itself.

NVIDIA's rival AMD had much less resistance with its rival utility—Radeon Software (later AMD Software), because right from the get-go, it strived to be only a configuration utility AMD drivers came with. NVIDIA, on the other hand, included its NVIDIA Control Panel Win32 application from the early 2000s, plus the GeForce Experience strategic bomber cockpit if you chose to have it. With NVIDIA App, team green is trying to be more like AMD.

NVIDIA App will be included into the GeForce driver package, GeForce Experience will get replaced, and the NVIDIA Control Panel will eventually retire, making NVIDIA App the only utility for your GeForce drivers. In this article, we take it for a spin.

Installation and First Launch

As of writing, the NVIDIA App is still being distributed as a standalone application. You get it from the NVIDIA website here. Installation takes a couple of clicks.


At first launch, you are greeted with a dialog where you select your preferred driver type. NVIDIA hands out two kinds of drivers for its GeForce hardware—Game Ready drivers targeting gamers, and Studio drivers targeting creators. You can switch between the two driver types at any time. The main difference between the two is the optimizations NVIDIA puts out with each release. Game Ready is a monthly (or sometimes bi-monthly) package timed with important game releases. The Studio drivers are quarterly (sometimes monthly) packages timed with the release of new creator applications or new features in those applications. These include game optimizations, too, but not as quickly as you want them if you're mainly gaming on your PC.


The next screen in the dialog lets you get NVIDIA App to automatically detect and apply optimal settings for all detected games. This is similar to what GeForce Experience does, and NVIDIA App carries over the game settings optimization tech over from the older utility. I found the default "enabled" checkbox to be in a rather unexpected location and people who just click "next... next" will miss it, and it will change the settings of all their apps and games, possibly in unexpected ways. Two separate buttons "yes," "no" would be the more honest choice I think.


The next screen lets you enable the NVIDIA Overlay, a persistent utility that you can bring up with Alt+Z (configurable), which gives you quick access to important settings, tools, and system monitoring in game. Same issue here, it's hard to spot that clicking on "Done" is actually "Yes, enable the Overlay."

Under the Hood

Once installed, the NVIDIA App shows up in your Start menu as simply "NVIDIA"—not "NVIDIA app," which could be slightly confusing to some less experienced users.


In the NVIDIA system tray icon context menu, the naming is written correctly, and it lets you launch NVIDIA App and the classic NVIDIA Control Panel.


When it first came out in February, we thought NVIDIA App was a Windows modern UI (UWP) application, but digging into Task Manager reveals that it is actually a CEF (Chrome Embedded Framework) application. The NVIDIA App encapsulates a miniaturized version of the Google Chrome web-browser, and NVIDIA App is actually an HTML-based application (just like WhatsApp Desktop or the Twitter/X desktop app).

Launching the NVIDIA App will actually start five processes that consume around 150 MB. This is in addition to the backend services for the app, which are running as "nvcontainer.exe," consuming another 60 MB. When clicking the X, the "NVIDIA app.exe" processes will all shut down, but the "nvcontainer.exe" processes will be running at all times. Overall memory consumption is quite reasonable.

The screenshot on the right shows a system without NVIDIA App installed, to confirm that "NVDisplay.Container" is running at all times, even without NVIDIA App.