NVIDIA App Features

The application is laid out in navigation tabs you see on the left-hand side. The home screen is quite de-cluttered when compared to GeForce Experience. There's just a marketing carousel on top, a list of installed games or applications, and a "Discover" section that lets you check out NVIDIA's other software.


When you hover over a game/application's tile in the Library, you get to tweak its settings (all the settings that NVIDIA App can), or launch it.


The Drivers tab gives you a bird's eye view of the GeForce drivers installed, including a well laid-out change-log that's actually more usable than the official changelog PDF that NVIDIA publishes. I really like the "What's New" section, with icons for the listed games. On this page you can also check for updates, fetch them, and switch between "Game Ready" and "Studio" drivers.


The Graphics tab is where the bulk of NVIDIA App's usefulness comes into play. Your installed games and apps are listed out, as are their current settings, and recommended value. A slider lets you tell the app what kind of optimization you want from it—whether you favor performance or eye-candy. This interface is a lot more de-cluttered than GeForce Experience, which is the App's strength.


The System tab is where all the hardware configuration stuff can be accessed, laid out in sub-tabs on top. The first tab gives you control over your display-related settings, the second one lets you configure video acceleration settings, including a few NVIDIA-exclusive features such as Video Super Resolution. In this tab there's a lot of functionality and I wonder why the developers didn't list those as separate pages on the left-side navigation bar—there's plenty of space for more entries and it would make interaction much more efficient.


The Performance tab lets you monitor and tweak your GPU, although it's not quite an overclocking utility like MSI Afterburner.

The Automatic Tuning feature will automagically find a safe and stable overclock for your graphics card. The good thing—this is fully covered by warranty! Also, and I confirmed this with NVIDIA: When you enable automatic tuning, it will re-scan automatically every month and adjust the tuning profile.

The "Performance Limits" section lets you change the parameters of the card, just sliders for clocks are missing. I confirmed with NVIDIA that changing these parameters will not void your warranty either. Very nice!

The help text and NVIDIA Reviewer's Guide is inaccurate here. It says that it changes the parameters for the automatic tuning function, but that is wrong. The sliders actually change the setting on the card—instantly—even when tuning is disabled. This can be verified using any 3rd party utility, including GPU-Z.


The "My Rig" tab is more of an information overview page, with more details available on the "View Rig Details" button.


The Rewards section in the main nav list is where you'll get to redeem rewards NVIDIA and game developers usually hand out. These could be stuff like private beta access, exclusive in-game items/content, etc. We predict that eventually all game bundles by NVIDIA will be tied to this page. You'll need an NVIDIA Account to use much this functionality. Everything else in the NVIDIA App works without login. I also tested running offline, and it just works, nothing is broken.


As expected, there's also a settings tab that lets you adjust the NVIDIA Overlay. Not sure if "Settings" is the right place for this—it should be its own section on the left "Overlay?"


This is an important setting, slightly hidden away, it has to do with the data your machine sends to NVIDIA. There is a "required data" setting that cannot be configured, but you have the ability to prevent sharing of configuration, performance, and usage data. By default, this is enabled. I asked NVIDIA for more details on what is "required data," but received no answer for this question (other questions were answered promptly).


You may also send feedback to NVIDIA using the button in the top right corner of the window. While I appreciate this feature, it's still a little bit rough around the edges. Text box starts out as single line, but can expand to up to 500 characters. But pressing key up and down moves the focus, not the cursor in the box. Also, text is clipped at the end and there's no scrollbar, so you can't move back to the top or to the bottom—only within the bounds of that text box.

When submitting, no ticket number gets created, or you're not made aware of it. There's also no way to add more info, or receive feedback from NVIDIA.