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I know people complain about Nvidia and Linux but one of the best parts of my experience with it was never having to deal with GFE. Just a bunch of project managers trying to make themselves useful by shovelling needless slop into your GPU driver.
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 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).
They 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.
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 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
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.
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.
For now, but the plan is to migrate away from it.
Damn I'm happy I went AMD.
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.
When I went team red for the first time earlier this year, I really scrutinized zoomed in screenshots to compare the upscaling for FSR and DLSS. With FSR 3, I couldn't see any difference compared to DLSS. Older FSR versions yeah, but at least for me not a problem any more.
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!
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.
Here's the quote, for people allergic to reading the update in the article.
Update: Nvidia sent us a statement: "We are aware of a reported performance issue related to Game Filters and are actively looking into it. You can turn off Game Filters from the NVIDIA App Settings > Features > Overlay > Game Filters and Photo Mode, and then relaunch your game."
We have tested this and confirmed that disabling the Game Filters and Photo Mode does indeed work. The problem appears to stem from the filters causing a performance loss, even when they're not being actively used. (With GeForce Experience, if you didn't have any game filters enabled, it didn't affect performance.) So, if you're only after the video capture features or game optimizations offered by the Nvidia App, you can get 'normal' performance by disabling the filters and photo modes.
So, TomsHW (is at least claiming that they) did indeed test this, and found that its the filters and photo mode causing the performance hit.
Still a pretty stupid problem to have, considering the old filters did not cause this problem, but at least there's a workaround.
... I'm curious if this new settings app even exists, or has been tested on linux.
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.
web Devs aren't ignorant to optimizing but the kind of interfaces used in web are very different to that of desktop. Cross platform technologies can work, but anything built on top of web engines is going to be a little dogshit on native platforms.
Web tech was designed around the asynchronous and comparatively slow nature of the network. Now, those same layout and rendering engines are being shoehorned into an environment where the "server" is your local disk so it's suddenly doing a bunch of work that was intended to be done iteratively.
Same goes the other way of course. Software designed for "native first" experiences like Flutter aren't as popular in web dev because they work on that same, but reversed, assumption of a local disk being your source.
It would be like wondering why physical game disks aren't popular on PC - it's a fundamentally different technology for fundamentally different expectations and needs.
but anything built on top of web engines is going to be a little dogshit on native platforms.
Hard disagree on "little".
Software designed for "native first" experiences like Flutter aren't as popular in web dev because they work on that same, but reversed, assumption of a local disk being your source.
Popularity should not be dictated by what web devs prefer. As long as they build for desktop, I won't pardon excessive resource usage. And I'm not talking about Flutter. Better performance oriented frameworks exist, see sciter.
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.
Steam recording causes my mouse to stop moving for 1-2 seconds every 5-10 seconds.
Just out of interest, lower your mouse polling rate to see if it still happens.
Not an ideal solution obviously.
I used to have hitching like this.
I had initially lowered it a bit at some point. I didn't realize it was steam recording for a while and spent a day or two trying driver updates and various things. next time I have a chance I'll try a significant decrease just for testing.
I already swore off nvidia. My 2080 has been the biggest pain in the ass
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.