There will be very few PC gamers who haven't had to deal with GeForce Experience at some point. Nvidia's GPU companion app has been available for quite some time at this point, and has been a frequent source of frustration for those with RTX (and previously GTX) graphics cards.
These irritations were varied, but a handful of consistently frustrating problems have long plagued the software. The dated and sometimes buggy user interface was a common complaint, but historically users also complained about issues like driver installation malfunctions, security breaches, and forced updates.
GeForce Experience was also generally quite limited, with most players simply using it to install the latest drivers and nothing else. And of course, a full login was required just to use it, an absurd requirement given that GPU drivers are available to download manually online without requiring any kind of account.
Well, PC gamers representing Team Green GPUs can finally celebrate, because GeForce Experience is finally heading to the big server in the sky, and Nvidia is already beta testing a replacement app. Having played with it myself, I'm pleased to say it's a huge step forward.
Bad experiences
The main problem with GeForce Experience, in my opinion, was always how little it offered compared to AMD's Radeon Adrenalin software and its rich feature set geared toward streamers and hardware tuners. Sure, some of those missing features can be found in the Nvidia Control Panel, but the newly designed Nvidia app will bring everything under one roof with a pleasingly modern and easy-to-navigate user interface.
The expanded functionality here is, from my brief time testing the new app on Computex 2024 last week, maybe not as deep as what Adrenalin offers, but everything important is there. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that AMD's app has a handful of options that the average user will never need to touch.
One feature I particularly liked was the auto overclock option, which essentially scans your entire system and then sets default overclocks for your GPU and VRAM to improve performance without the need to mess around in the BIOS. It's this type of usability feature that Nvidia should focus on with future Nvidia app updates: functionality that makes 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 much easier to open and use instantly compared to GeForce Experience or the Nvidia Control Panel.
You can try the new Nvidia app right 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 didn't have any problems while testing it. As a bonus, it even uninstalls GeForce Experience during setup. Goodbye, I say!
