When we tested gaming performance using Nvidia’s new “Nvidia Apps,” which are installed by default with driver packages, we found that performance decreased by up to 15% in some games.
When Nvidia rolled out the 566.14 driver last month, it officially placed GeForce Experience (GFE) into legacy status. When you load GFE on 566.14 for the first time, you will be asked to update to the new Nvidia app. You can decline, but no further updates will be made to GFE. With the 566.36 driver, Nvidia has removed GFE completely and only the Nvidia app is present. Alternatively, you can run it without any additional features provided and install only the driver. We’ve seen reports around the web that Nvidia apps are negatively impacting game performance, causing framerate drops of up to 15% in some cases, so skipping them for the time being may be a better course of action. There is a gender.
It’s not immediately obvious, but 15% is a significant performance drop caused by driver or application updates. To put it objectively, GPU benchmarks show that the more expensive RTX 4060 Ti is only 18% faster than the base model RTX 4060 when both are run at 1080p medium settings. Thankfully, the performance drop isn’t typically 15%, but when we tested it on the 4060, we saw a 2-12% framerate drop across the five games we tested.
Using numbers from a recent Intel Arc B580 review and after a clean driver install, I retested some games, this time without installing the Nvidia apps as part of the package. The Nvidia app was initially running with default settings (i.e., overlay enabled but not actively used). Here’s a performance summary:
There were a few anomalies, like Stalker 2 on 1440p ultra running faster in apps, but the numbers were inconsistent as I was clearly lacking VRAM in both cases. Perhaps you just had “lucky” results when you did your first test. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was also slightly faster at 1440p ultra results when using the app. Still, within the margin of error, neither result was particularly encouraging below 30 fps.
Elsewhere, performance improved when the Nvidia app was not installed (or at least not running, although I haven’t seen that scenario). Since 1080p media is a CPU-limited scenario, we somewhat expected to see the highest deltas, but the performance impact was largely independent of the settings and resolutions we tested. Some games saw a small performance impact, while others saw a large impact. Of course, we’re only talking about one set of hardware being tested at the moment. However, it is clear that there is an issue with significant performance degradation.
Some say Unreal Engine 5 games are the most affected, but our numbers show the biggest loss is Assassin’s Creed Mirage, which lost 9% on 1080p medium, 12% on 1080p ultra, and 6% on 1440p ultra. decreased. Stalker 2 was down about 6% as well (skip 1440p ultra results), while Black Myth: Wukong was only down around 2-6%. Baldur’s Gate 3, a DirectX 11 game, took a 3-4% hit, and Flight Simulator 2024 also dropped 6% at 1080p.
There’s no doubt that the performance drop will vary depending on the CPU and GPU, but it’s impossible to say exactly how much without further testing. At least one user reported up to a 15% performance drop in Black Myth: Wukong when testing an RTX 4080 Super paired with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, so higher-performance GPUs may be affected even more. there is.
We’ve reached out to Nvidia for comment, and expect frantic work to be done behind the scenes to figure out the root cause and hopefully fix it. In the meantime, if you don’t need the extra features the app offers and prefer higher gaming performance, we recommend performing a clean driver installation and skipping the Nvidia app for now. After spending most of the past year in beta status, one can only wonder why Nvidia didn’t extend the beta for a few more months and leave it there.
