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.
so why do we need this app again?
It’s replacing the old Nvidia control panel
It’s replacing GeForce Experience. The nVidia Control Panel is still around.
The 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 was terrible because it always forgot my login and fuck if I’m going to remember a password just to update drivers.
At least they’ve done away with that bit.
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.
Yeah I disable those back when I noticed World of Warcraft started performing badly. GFE had helpfully optimised it to run at a resolution 4x higher than my screen and downscaled it…
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?
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 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.
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
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.
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.
I mean, my point is there’s no reason they should be overhauling it entirely (at the cost of performance) when they could just pay some competent Windows programmers to un-shit the existing Control Panel. Yeah its UI sucks but it’s not going to make you drop frames for just having it open
IIRC the framework it‘s built on is so ancient it didn‘t allow for that, they needed to re-write the whole thing to „fix“ it, and this is what they came up with for that. DF‘s Alex said as much in one of their podcast episodes. All just paraphrased by me of course.
I don‘t think the performance hit is by design or intentional anyway, so hopefully the current screw-up is gonna be a nothing burger by the time the app‘s mandatory (if it ever will be).
For now, but the plan is to migrate away from it.
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.
Sounds like something adjusted something in the nvidia control panel and the monitor is balancing that out with a low red value.
Maybe worth to take a look.
Damn I’m happy I went AMD.
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 went Linux + AMD. No more pesky adwares.
Same. Never looked back.
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.
The proprietary gsync approach with a dedicated hw module is indeed dead and most “g-sync” monitors just use the now pretty common vesa’s vrr (aka freesync).
However I did research a bit and found some “gsync pulsar” monitors but none have been released yet, I believe. They do sound like unnecessary overpriced products though. That’s Nvidia for ya.
Use none of them. Embrace funny duck
ROCM works mostly well in replacement of CUDA, and it gets better and better every year
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!
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.
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.
Yeah they didn’t test that. Nor did they test having the app installed but not running. Crummy article tbh.
Disagree, and i don’t think it’s the point.
As an average user, why am I paying a performance hit for nvidia’s own “recommended parameters”
That’s trash and a terrible experience, and they should be called out for it.
I don’t think you’re understanding. The testing they did was presumably fine and the performance hit is probably unacceptable. But mentioning but not testing the scenarios of
- app installed but not running
- app installed and running but overlay turned off
Is kinda mailing it in.
I’ll give you that, yep, sure.
But that doesn’t invalidate the data they did get, it’s just not a full picture.
I already swore off nvidia. My 2080 has been the biggest pain in the ass
How has it been such a pain? I haven’t even thought about my GPU once since I installed it… but I only use regular drivers.
Interesting, as DSOgaming got 4-6% in some games, 0% in others.
Dsogaming has barely ever been a reliable source tbh
