News We tested the Nvidia App performance problems — games can run up to 15 percent slower with the app

[Admin]

Nvidia officially pushed GeForce Experience to legacy status last month, and the latest 566.36 drivers install the replacement Nvidia App by default. But the app causes a clear loss in performance in the games we've checked, and others are reporting similar findings.

We tested the Nvidia App performance problems — games can run up to 15 percent slower with the app : Read more

 

[ThisOrThat]

What were the settings in the Nvidia app? There's no mention in the article. Especially interested in whether the overlay was enabled, and if so were there any other overlays active (Steam, etc.) at the same time?

 

[Notton]

This is the first time I've heard of this issue, but I'm glad you pointed it nonetheless.

Have you noticed any difference in image quality with and without the app running?
It feels like nvidia shenanigans again.

 

[logainofhades]

Hmm, I thought WoW was running a bit slower than normal, on my laptop recently. I will have to see if removing this fixes the problem.

 

[heize]

Soo... what Windows version was this tested on? Windows 11?

 

[txfeinbergs]

There are a lot more problems than just slower performance with the Nvidia App. Go to the Nvidia forums and look at all the complaints. I am staying the hell away from that thing for now.

 

[ThatMouse]

This is nothing new! GeForce Experience had the same issues. Always just install the driver only.

 

[Heat_Fan89]

I tried Geforce Experience once and saw NO point in using it when I can fine tune games myself. That's why I have not installed it since and have zero interest in the NV App.

 

[d0x360]

What were the settings in the Nvidia app? There's no mention in the article. Especially interested in whether the overlay was enabled, and if so were there any other overlays active (Steam, etc.) at the same time?

Yeah that's kind of mission critical info and exactly what I was looking for since the article if anything is going to affect performance with this app versus gfe experience it's going to be the overlay and capture settings most likely.

 

[JamesJones44]

Personally, I would stick with selecting "install drivers only" unless someone has a reason to install all of the other things Nvidia tries to install during the driver installation. Drivers only used to still install the Nvidia Control Panel (interestingly enough), not sure if that is still the case.

 

[heize]

Yeah that's kind of mission critical info and exactly what I was looking for since the article if anything is going to affect performance with this app versus gfe experience it's going to be the overlay and capture settings most likely.

From what I've seen browsing the net so far, all tests have been done on Windows 11 from the looks of it. I'm too lazy to uninstall NVApp on my Windows 10 to test it myself, but disabling overlay and whatever does not have any effect on my framerates whatsoever. This could be something exclusive to Windows 11.
Neither GFE nor NVApp should have any performance impact when you're not actually using any of it's features (filters, video recording, rtx hdr).
This is just a bad clickbaity article - we tested performance problems! (but we actually didn't fully test anything). Not testing Win 10 when half of PC gamers are still using this OS? Like come on.

 

[SeaTech]

This is not really a new thing, GFE has always been collecting telemetry in the background, now that is shifting to nvidia app...what is sad is the discontinuation of nvidia control panel which does NOT have all that stuff running in the background, only the settings portion which I actually appreciated. It is an irony that the very thing that helps them optimize games to run better, is also the thing which makes them run so much slower. So congrats everyone using the nvidia app you are their new beta testers! Petition needs to be made to have OPT-OUT option. Bad enough if you have epic running telemetry in the background and then nvidia on top of that.

 

[Jagar123]

Interesting findings.

Jarred, were you allowing the Nvidia App to "optimize" any of the games tested?

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Interesting findings.

Jarred, were you allowing the Nvidia App to "optimize" any of the games tested?

I tested the same way, so I do not use "Nvidia optimized" settings in any games — I need to test every GPU with the same settings, whether it's Nvidia, AMD, or Intel.

The test hardware is the same as in the Arc B580 review. Here's for those that couldn't be bothered to look it up:

TOM'S HARDWARE AMD ZEN 5 PC

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
ASRock Taichi X670E
G.Skill TridentZ5 Neo 2x16GB DDR5-6000 CL28
Crucial T700 4TB
Cooler Master ML280 Mirror
Corsair HX1500i

Windows 11 24H2. Nvidia App using default settings, overlay is enabled (as that sort of seems like the only reason to have the App installed IMO, so that you can do AV1 video capture, streaming, etc.) I've heard that there may be a bug causing this specific issue, so we will have to wait and see what happens.

 

[heize]

Windows 11 24H2

Man, Microsoft is on a roll with the Win11 updates.
Broken Ryzen performance, broken Ubisoft games, now broken NVApp...
For what it's worth I've not seen anyone confirming this issue on Windows 10, yet.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Sounds like it's probably it's probably "auto optimizing" games even though you tell it not to and it showing that it's not. Would be interesting to see the results of old drivers and optimized settings vs new drivers and non optimized.

 

[heize]

Sounds like it's probably it's probably "auto optimizing" games even though you tell it not to and it showing that it's not. Would be interesting to see the results of old drivers and optimized settings vs new drivers and non optimized.

You can easily check in-game options to see whether any of the settings got changed, I'm sure something trivial like that was double checked before the article got published.

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Sounds like it's probably it's probably "auto optimizing" games even though you tell it not to and it showing that it's not. Would be interesting to see the results of old drivers and optimized settings vs new drivers and non optimized.

Yeah, remember: Nvidia App runs slower, not faster. Auto-optimize usually turns down certain settings to improve the FPS, but that's not happening. I mean, I can dig into further details.

Avg. GPU clocks:
Without NV App: 2766 MHz
With NV App: 2774 MHz
So an 8MHz difference, probably not going to be significant.

Avg. GPU load:
Without NV App: 98.4%
With NV App: 98.1%
Still small.

Avg. CPU clocks:
Without NV App: 5198 MHz
With NV App: 5193 MHz
Still small difference, though interesting that it's slightly lower with NV App.

Avg. GPU power:
Without NV App: 121.2W
With NV App: 120.5W

I'm not seeing much, other than just generally worse performance with the NV App installed. Here's the full data. Given it has been privately acknowledged to me, as a bug, I'd assume we'll get an official statement and a fix at some point reasonably soon.

         ACMirage RTX 4060 NoNVApp (1) - AVG: 150.5   99pMIN: 106.2   99th: 113.7     MIN:  85.8     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5179.3   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  56.8   GPUPWR: 112.9   GPU%:  98.2
         ACMirage RTX 4060 NoNVApp (2) - AVG: 110.1   99pMIN:  78.9   99th:  84.9     MIN:  65.9     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5192.9   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  55.1   GPUPWR: 109.4   GPU%:  98.1
         ACMirage RTX 4060 NoNVApp (3) - AVG:  78.9   99pMIN:  60.1   99th:  63.0     MIN:  53.8     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5192.5   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  57.0   GPUPWR: 116.4   GPU%:  97.6
               b1 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (1) - AVG:  69.5   99pMIN:  57.4   99th:  58.5     MIN:  45.4     Latency:  60.7   CPUCLK: 5189.6   GPUCLK: 2767.1   GPUTemp:  58.1   GPUPWR: 125.0   GPU%:  98.7
               b1 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (2) - AVG:  32.2   99pMIN:  27.9   99th:  28.2     MIN:  26.8     Latency: 133.8   CPUCLK: 5170.8   GPUCLK: 2699.7   GPUTemp:  57.8   GPUPWR: 122.4   GPU%:  99.0
               b1 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (3) - AVG:  22.7   99pMIN:  19.6   99th:  20.0     MIN:  18.4     Latency: 191.6   CPUCLK: 5161.7   GPUCLK: 2679.7   GPUTemp:  58.0   GPUPWR: 123.6   GPU%:  99.0
              bg3 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (1) - AVG: 125.6   99pMIN:  82.7   99th:  87.9     MIN:  67.4     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5213.6   GPUCLK: 2788.7   GPUTemp:  57.7   GPUPWR: 130.5   GPU%:  98.9
              bg3 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (2) - AVG: 105.0   99pMIN:  70.0   99th:  74.4     MIN:  64.3     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5212.2   GPUCLK: 2758.6   GPUTemp:  58.6   GPUPWR: 134.1   GPU%:  99.0
              bg3 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (3) - AVG:  72.7   99pMIN:  51.1   99th:  54.1     MIN:  46.9     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5212.0   GPUCLK: 2741.2   GPUTemp:  58.6   GPUPWR: 132.8   GPU%:  99.0
FlightSimulator24 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (1) - AVG:  81.2   99pMIN:  67.9   99th:  72.1     MIN:  37.4     Latency:  29.3   CPUCLK: 5212.1   GPUCLK: 2774.6   GPUTemp:  58.1   GPUPWR: 123.9   GPU%:  97.8
FlightSimulator24 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (2) - AVG:  42.3   99pMIN:  38.0   99th:  38.5     MIN:  37.1     Latency:  52.9   CPUCLK: 5210.2   GPUCLK: 2779.0   GPUTemp:  58.8   GPUPWR: 122.0   GPU%:  98.2
FlightSimulator24 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (3) - AVG:  28.8   99pMIN:  22.7   99th:  26.0     MIN:  16.6     Latency:  71.6   CPUCLK: 5210.0   GPUCLK: 2769.5   GPUTemp:  57.5   GPUPWR: 119.7   GPU%:  97.9
         Stalker2 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (1) - AVG:  62.7   99pMIN:  46.5   99th:  48.9     MIN:  42.1     Latency:  62.7   CPUCLK: 5205.4   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  57.6   GPUPWR: 120.8   GPU%:  98.3
         Stalker2 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (2) - AVG:  46.0   99pMIN:  28.4   99th:  34.9     MIN:   9.6     Latency:  87.2   CPUCLK: 5204.8   GPUCLK: 2785.4   GPUTemp:  58.3   GPUPWR: 124.5   GPU%:  98.6
         Stalker2 RTX 4060 NoNVApp (3) - AVG:  21.2   99pMIN:   3.6   99th:   5.0     MIN:   2.4     Latency: 194.2   CPUCLK: 5201.8   GPUCLK: 2791.2   GPUTemp:  55.3   GPUPWR: 100.3   GPU%:  97.2

         ACMirage RTX 4060 (1) - AVG: 137.4   99pMIN:  97.9   99th: 106.6     MIN:  77.4     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5185.5   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  55.8   GPUPWR: 107.7   GPU%:  96.3
         ACMirage RTX 4060 (2) - AVG:  97.5   99pMIN:  71.1   99th:  76.4     MIN:  52.1     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5194.5   GPUCLK: 2805.0   GPUTemp:  54.8   GPUPWR: 105.4   GPU%:  96.3
         ACMirage RTX 4060 (3) - AVG:  74.3   99pMIN:  57.7   99th:  60.9     MIN:  49.1     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5190.3   GPUCLK: 2805.0   GPUTemp:  55.3   GPUPWR: 111.7   GPU%:  96.8
               b1 RTX 4060 (1) - AVG:  65.6   99pMIN:  54.7   99th:  56.0     MIN:  50.7     Latency:  68.8   CPUCLK: 5185.9   GPUCLK: 2788.7   GPUTemp:  57.5   GPUPWR: 122.2   GPU%:  98.9
               b1 RTX 4060 (2) - AVG:  31.3   99pMIN:  24.3   99th:  27.2     MIN:   5.1     Latency: 142.0   CPUCLK: 5170.0   GPUCLK: 2711.0   GPUTemp:  58.5   GPUPWR: 121.9   GPU%:  99.0
               b1 RTX 4060 (3) - AVG:  22.3   99pMIN:  19.4   99th:  19.7     MIN:  18.4     Latency: 197.8   CPUCLK: 5159.2   GPUCLK: 2687.1   GPUTemp:  58.6   GPUPWR: 123.9   GPU%:  99.0
              bg3 RTX 4060 (1) - AVG: 122.2   99pMIN:  77.7   99th:  86.5     MIN:  61.8     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5206.9   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  58.2   GPUPWR: 128.1   GPU%:  98.0
              bg3 RTX 4060 (2) - AVG: 101.4   99pMIN:  68.4   99th:  72.4     MIN:  61.9     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5206.5   GPUCLK: 2779.1   GPUTemp:  59.0   GPUPWR: 133.1   GPU%:  98.0
              bg3 RTX 4060 (3) - AVG:  70.1   99pMIN:  50.2   99th:  52.3     MIN:  47.0     Latency:   0.0   CPUCLK: 5205.9   GPUCLK: 2759.4   GPUTemp:  59.4   GPUPWR: 132.3   GPU%:  98.2
FlightSimulator24 RTX 4060 (1) - AVG:  76.4   99pMIN:  62.0   99th:  68.0     MIN:  34.8     Latency:  34.6   CPUCLK: 5201.6   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  57.7   GPUPWR: 120.7   GPU%:  97.6
FlightSimulator24 RTX 4060 (2) - AVG:  40.5   99pMIN:  36.1   99th:  36.6     MIN:  35.5     Latency:  58.2   CPUCLK: 5199.5   GPUCLK: 2786.7   GPUTemp:  58.5   GPUPWR: 118.3   GPU%:  98.3
FlightSimulator24 RTX 4060 (3) - AVG:  29.7   99pMIN:  24.1   99th:  24.8     MIN:  21.4     Latency:  71.8   CPUCLK: 5192.6   GPUCLK: 2757.3   GPUTemp:  57.9   GPUPWR: 123.9   GPU%:  98.2
         Stalker2 RTX 4060 (1) - AVG:  59.3   99pMIN:  42.2   99th:  45.1     MIN:  38.3     Latency:  70.4   CPUCLK: 5198.4   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  57.0   GPUPWR: 116.5   GPU%:  98.4
         Stalker2 RTX 4060 (2) - AVG:  43.4   99pMIN:  26.4   99th:  30.5     MIN:  15.0     Latency:  95.4   CPUCLK: 5198.1   GPUCLK: 2790.0   GPUTemp:  58.3   GPUPWR: 119.8   GPU%:  98.8
         Stalker2 RTX 4060 (3) - AVG:  31.3   99pMIN:  11.9   99th:  17.6     MIN:   3.0     Latency: 137.2   CPUCLK: 5196.4   GPUCLK: 2786.8   GPUTemp:  58.3   GPUPWR: 122.6   GPU%:  99.0

 

[JamesJones44]

Avg. CPU clocks:
Without NV App: 5198 MHz
With NV App: 5193 MHz
Still small difference, though interesting that it's slightly lower with NV App.

Out of curiosity is the CPU load different with it installed vs uninstalled?

The rest of the physical numbers (not FPS) seem like they would be within a margin of error.

 

[Mama Changa]

Well done Nvidia, replacing GeFarce with something even worse.

 

[txfeinbergs]

Yeah, and for those of you saying just don't install it, it won't be optional in the near future as it will replace the control panel. They better fix all this stuff before they force it on us.

 

[aberkae]

I noticed Vermitide 2 had worse performance on my 4090 suprim liquid as of late. Now I know why. Unfortunately I sold mine so I can't replicate the finding. This better go viral.

 

[Mindstab Thrull]

Just making sure:
Is this Nvidia app vs GFE or Nvidia vs no software at all? If the latter, are you relying on Windows for the drivers?

Mindstab Thrull
Nomming ur sanity since 1864 BSE (before the Sarpadian Empires)

 

[wr3zzz]

Is this a problem with the App or driver? I have never used GFE but have been using the App for about a year now. I have been getting memory errors related to VRAM since with the new App version with GFE phased out but that coincides with new driver and Windows updates. However I don't play that many games and AFAIK not all apps with VRAM errors use Nvidia app features.

 

[boju]

Yeah, and for those of you saying just don't install it, it won't be optional in the near future as it will replace the control panel. They better fix all this stuff before they force it on us.

This, id say it'll improve over time. Hdr has supposedly improved a lot too with this app.