Source: Nvidia
Whether you use AMD, Intel, or Nvidia GPUs, your graphics card comes with an application that offers additional settings to tweak your GPU. Owners of Nvidia cards have access to the Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience, two programs that enable users to customize their gaming experience even more than with settings that are in individual games. While it looks like there’s lots to do in these apps, in reality most options don’t really do anything apart from a few key settings. Here’s everything you should pay attention to in the Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience.
Nvidia Control Panel
When opening up the Control Panel for the first time, you’ll be greeted with a UI that looks straight out of 2005. That’s not an exaggeration either, some icons are literally from Windows XP and some images depict Nvidia GPUs as they existed in the early to mid 2000s. The Control Panel doesn’t look modern, and it can be pretty slow to navigate, but at least it works.
On a typical Nvidia GPU, you’ll see three primary categories on the left side of the window: 3D Settings, Display, and Video. I’m going to go through these one by one and point out the settings you should keep an eye out for and maybe change, because most of these settings either do nothing most of the time or do so little that they might as well do nothing.
3D Settings
Source: XDA
In the 3D Settings category, there are three submenus:
- Adjust image settings with preview is one you can safely ignore as it’s largely a relic of the past. You’ll want to make sure that the bubble next to Use the advanced 3D image settings is filled in if it’s not already. Otherwise, there’s not anything else to do here.
- Manage 3D Settings is where the meat of Nvidia Control Panel exists, and we’ll be circling back to it in a bit.
- Configure Surround, PhysX is another menu that’s not very useful nowadays. Here, you can setup a “Surround” display, which allows you to combine multiple monitors into one big virtual display. So if you have like four monitors in a 2×2 grid, you might find this useful, but it’s a niche setting for everyone else. You can also change the PhysX settings here, but considering PhysX doesn’t get much use these days, I’d recommend just keeping it on its default setting, Auto-select.
Easily the most important submenu of all these three is Manage 3D Settings, which is full of graphics options you can change. However, most of these settings are also vestiges of a time when driver settings mattered much more for gaming. Today, there’s really only three settings you should consider changing:
- Low Latency Mode (not to be confused with Nvidia Reflex) is a setting you might want to enable if you want to have better response time, which is particularly beneficial in esports titles like Fortnite and Apex Legends. It’s off by default, but you can select ‘On’ to get the normal version, or ‘Ultra’ to get an even better effect. However, this setting is supposed to be CPU intensive and might not run well on all hardware.
- Max Frame Rate can be useful if you have a G-SYNC, G-SYNC Compatible, FreeSync, or Adaptive Sync display, since their anti-screen tearing technologies stop working once the framerate exceeds the refresh rate. In most games you shouldn’t need to set a max framerate because the refresh rate is usually respected as the maximum framerate, but there are a few that might blow past your refresh rate.
- Monitor Technology is a really important setting if your monitor has G-SYNC, G-SYNC Compatible, FreeSync, or Adaptive Sync. You should change this setting to whatever you use on your primary monitor to ensure that you’re getting the benefits of your anti-screen tearing technology.
Display
Source: XDA
The Display category has eight whole submenus, and most of them are completely useless. Here’s the short version:
- Change resolution is actually useful and contains some settings we’ll be coming back to.
- Adjust desktop color settings just contains typical monitor color settings like brightness, contrast, gamma, etc. You might find this useful if you hate navigating your monitor’s OSD, which is generally going to provide better results.
- Rotate display is exactly what it sounds like and allows you to rotate the orientation of displays, which you can just do in the normal Windows settings.
- View HDCP Status doesn’t have anything you can change in it, and only tells you whether your GPU supports HDCP.
- Set up digital audio practically does nothing as it just directs you to the old Windows Sound program.
- Adjust Desktop Size and Position has quite a few settings but they’re mostly to do with how things appear on your monitor(s), and unless you’re doing something specific or are experiencing issues like overscan, I’d leave this submenu alone.
- Set up G-SYNC is a useful submenu that I’ll come back to.
- Set up multiple displays allows you to enable and disable monitors, and change their relative positions to each other. It’s the same thing you can do in the regular Windows display settings.
There were two submenus here I said were the most important, and the first one is Change Resolution, which shares many of the options that you can do in the regular Windows Settings app, but it also offers a few other important settings. Firstly, you can change the Nvidia color settings, and sometimes your Nvidia GPU by default can use worse color settings. You’ll want to set Output color format to RGB and Output dynamic range to Full.
The other thing here that’s interesting is the Customize button, which allows you to set a custom resolution and refresh rate. Click on Customize then Create Custom Resolution and then accept Nvidia’s terms and conditions, and you pretty much have free rein over your resolution settings. You can even set the resolution higher than your monitor’s for a brute force kind of anti-aliasing, or even try and overclock your monitor’s refresh rate (which is not something Nvidia officially supports, obviously).
The Set up G-SYNC submenu is also important because it contains more G-SYNC related settings than the Manage 3D Settings submenu contains. Here, you can click a checkbox to enable G-SYNC or G-SYNC Compatible, and then enable it either just in full screen games or both full screen and windowed games (you should definitely enable it in both, by the way). You can also choose to apply settings to a specific monitor if you have multiple that have anti-screen tearing technology.
You may notice a warning that says “Selected Display is not validated as G-SYNC Compatible,” but don’t worry, that’s not actually a bad thing. G-SYNC Compatible is simply Nvidia’s label for monitors that use FreeSync or Adaptive Sync that Nvidia has validated or certified, which is just a marketing thing and has nothing to do with whether the anti-screen tearing technology works. If you have a FreeSync or Adaptive Sync display, just enable G-SYNC/G-SYNC Compatible and ignore that warning.
Video
In the Video category, there’s only two submenus:
- Adjust video color settings literally only applies to video playback apps run on Windows, like Windows Media Player, and you can change settings like color, brightness, gamma, and so on. Unless you download all your videos to watch locally, you can ignore all these settings.
- Adjust video image settings also has an assortment of useless settings for video playback apps, except one. Nvidia’s RTX video enhancement feature upscales the resolution of videos on certain web browsers, though at the time of writing only Chromium browsers support this feature. RTX video enhancement isn’t as big of a deal as DLSS, but it can make videos look a little better. You might as well enable it and set the quality to 4.
And that’s pretty much it for Nvidia Control Panel. There’s tons of settings to change here, but the vast majority of them are either non-functional in most applications, or things you wouldn’t want to change anyways.
Nvidia GeForce Experience
Source: XDA
GeForce Experience is an optional app you can install alongside your Nvidia drivers. Before you can start using GeForce Experience, you need to create an account with Nvidia or link one from another platform, like Google. Once you’re signed in, GeForce Experience will ask you to let it optimize all your games, and you should probably say no. In most cases, you’re probably better off either choosing an in-game preset or changing the settings yourself.
There are two main tabs: Home and Drivers. The Home tab is where you can access your games, and each game has two options: Launch and Details. Clicking on Details will show you a game’s current graphics settings and compare them to Nvidia’s “optimal” settings, which you can enable by clicking the Optimize button. The Drivers tab is even more limited and just lets you update your drivers. If you want to get to the real settings, you’ll have to click on the gear icon next to your username in the top right corner of the window.
Settings
Source: XDA
The settings menu has four submenus of its own: General, Account, Games & Apps, and Shield. The General tab is the most interesting; you can enable experimental features, automatically download drivers, and apply an image upscaler to your games (this is not the same as DLSS, by the way). But easily the most important option here is for the In-Game Overlay, which is where Shadowplay’s recording, instant replay, and broadcasting features are, as well as stuff like a performance overlay. There’s yet another settings submenu for the In-Game Overlay you can access here.
On laptops, you’ll also see options related to power saving, so you can limit how much power the GPU uses or how loud the fans should get.
The other submenus aren’t that important. Under Account you can change your avatar and enable or disable being remembered on your PC, Games & Apps allows you to rescan for games not shown on the Home tab as well as enabling or disabling automatic game optimization, and the Shield submenu allows you to stream your PC games to an Nvidia Shield.
Lots of settings to choose from, not many that actually matter
The story of Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience is that while there are many settings to change, only a few of them will likely matter to most users. That’s actually not unique for Nvidia, as AMD’s and Intel’s driver suites are similarly filled with settings you don’t really need to worry about.
But within all those irrelevant settings, there are a few really important ones that are crucial in making your GPU as good for gaming as it can be (short of getting a brand-new one), such as enabling G-SYNC and customizing Shadowplay. If you’re setting up your PC for the first time, you’ll probably want to take a quick look through the Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience to edit the most important settings.