Conclusion

NVIDIA App avoids the biggest pitfall of GeForce Experience—it's not pretending to be the center of your gaming PC, it's not looking to replace your game launchers, and most importantly, it's not complicated to the extent of looking nebulous, or worse—suspicious. You can tell right off the bat that NVIDIA wanted a clean-slate application which covers all the essential needs, so gamers feel welcome using the app, but don't find themselves spending too much time with it. You ideally want your game launcher to bring you the game-related social experience, and you want your GPU driver's utility to limit itself to only optimizing graphics settings. The new NVIDIA App does this well.

UI Design, Visuals & Offline
Visually, the App looks good, it's clean enough to be usable by Gamers, Creators, Consumers, or Professionals. At the same time it looks modern enough with its various shades of gray and sparingly used gradients. The texts and icons are clear and easy to understand. GeForce Experience was off to a rough start because it came with a forced NVIDIA account registration—people don't want that. NVIDIA App on the other hand is designed to work without login. I tested all the features and the only thing that required a login is the "Redeem" feature, which is not unreasonable. I also tested running the app offline, and it works very well, after it had downloaded the game profiles once. If you install the app without ever having Internet and run it, it will still work to change the display settings and configure other things, and you can add games manually, which is a good-enough offline experience. ShadowPlay and the overlay work, too. Nicely done!

Resource Usage
The NVIDIA App, a Chrome Browser Embedded Framework (CEF) application, launches five processes using around 150 MB of memory, plus backend services ("nvcontainer.exe") that consume 60 MB. Closing the app stops the main processes, but "nvcontainer.exe" continues running in the background. This is a reasonable amount of memory used, considering RAM capacities these days. The app also runs very fast and isn't sluggish at all.

Driver Updates
Driver updates are integrated in a seamless way, and you can choose whether new drivers should be downloaded automatically, and you choose when to install them. You can also just receive a notification, or mute this feature. The changelog on the Driver page is actually the best list that NVIDIA publishes, and easy to navigate. The official PDF is very long and hard to digest, and lacks details about things like G-SYNC monitor support and game profiles, and the blog post has too much marketing fluff to be a quick "5 second overlook" resource. Huge fan of those little icons for the games, that make it so much easier to get an idea whether something changed that affects your gameplay.

Game Recording
While Shadowplay is accessible through the NVIDIA Overlay, without login, I feel like this feature could be integrated a bit better in the App. For example, getting a list of the videos you captured would be nice. Maybe a basic video editor could be added here, too, to cut and re-encode videos, or even publish them online. For less experienced users such an addition would help to make them aware of the recording capability.

Overclocking
A notable addition is the automatic overclocking feature, which has been around in one form or another in the past. The great news is that using it does not void the warranty and there are some additional dials you can play with that don't void the warranty either. Just one thing is missing—the sliders for GPU clock and memory. I guess it makes sense to keep these locked away from users, because warranty. On the other hand, if there was some kind of unlockable "Overclocking will void the warranty" alert that unlocks these additional features, NVIDIA could achieve parity with AMD, who are providing a good, complete, overclocking experience in their Radeon Settings.

Bugs
Things are still a little bit rough around the edges and I found a few UI issues within an hour of testing, but I'm sure NVIDIA can address all of these, and declaring the App as non-Beta will help get it out to more users, so they can collect more feedback. It probably also boosts the project internally, so that more resources will be allocated to it, which means more developers, more QA testing, more features.

Driver Integration & Legacy Control Panel
I asked NVIDIA about their plans for the various control panel products, and they answered that NVIDIA App will be included in the default driver package download this month, as soon as it's out of Beta. It will also replace GeForce Experience: "you can only have NVIDIA App or GFE, and NVIDIA App is now our recommendation" When asked about the legacy control panel, NVIDIA responded that "Control Panel will continue to be a separate app as we continue to port features" but also that the App will "eventually" replace it.