Complete guide to Nvidia Control Panel and the Nvidia app

Whether you use AMD, Intel, or Nvidia GPUs, your graphics card will come with a companion app that allows you to control settings and any additional tools the manufacturer has designed. AMD Radeon cards use AMD Software Adrenalin Edition, Intel's Arc range uses Arc Control, and Nvidia uses the Nvidia Control Panel and the Nvidia app. Nvidia also used to have GeForce Experience, but that's been phased out and replaced by the Nvidia app.

Both of these programs have some level of cross-over, as Nvidia Control Panel is mostly legacy controls, while the Nvidia app is the newest tool. You can customize your gaming experience with global settings or per-app controls, but many of the settings you can control here are legacy code that aren't really utilized by modern games. Here's a rundown of every setting you should take notice of in both the Nvidia Control Panel and the Nvidia app.

Nvidia Control Panel

A useful utility with some crucial settings

When you open the Control Panel for the first time, you'll be greeted with a UI that looks straight out from 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 can be pretty slow to navigate, but at least it works.

On a typical Nvidia GPU, the left side of the window displays three primary categories: 3D Settings, Display, and Video. I'll go through these individually and point out the settings you should monitor and maybe change. Most of these settings either do nothing most of the time or do so little that they might as well do nothing.

3D Settings

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 2x2 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 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 are 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 a few 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

The Display category has eight whole submenus, and most of them are completely useless. Here's the short version:

• Change resolution is useful and includes some settings we'll be returning to.
• Adjust desktop color settings include 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 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.

  You'll only see this option if you have a G-SYNC compatible monitor.

• Set up multiple displays allows you to enable and disable monitors, and change their relative positions to each other. You can do the same in the regular Windows display settings.

I said two submenus were the most important. The first one is Change Resolution, which shares many of the options you can use in the regular Windows Settings app but also offers a few other important settings. Firstly, you can change the Nvidia color settings. Sometimes, your Nvidia GPU, by default, uses worse color settings. You'll want to set the Output color format to RGB and the Output dynamic range to Full.

The other interesting feature 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 brute-force antialiasing or even try to 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. Here, you can click a checkbox to enable G-SYNC or G-SYNC Compatible and then enable it only in full-screen games or both full-screen and windowed games (you should definitely enable it in both, by the way). You can also apply settings to a specific monitor if you have multiple anti-screen tearing technologies.

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. It is just a marketing tool that does not concern whether the anti-screen tearing technology works. If you have a FreeSync or Adaptive Sync display, enable G-SYNC/G-SYNC Compatible and ignore that warning.

Video

In the Video category, there are 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 a deal as DLSS, but it can make videos look better. You might as well enable it and set the quality to 4.

That's pretty much it for the Nvidia Control Panel. There are many settings to change here, but the vast majority are either non-functional in most applications or unnecessary.

Nvidia app

Use it for more than just driver updates

Most of the tools included with the Nvidia driver package are now in the Nvidia app, which is the replacement for GeForce Experience. It's an optional part of the driver installation, but I recommend you install it because it includes ShadowPlay, Nvidia's easy-to-use game recording tool. Unlike the prior software, you don't have to make an Nvidia account to keep your drivers up to date. You can still make an account if you prefer, which you'll need to do for redeeming games bundled with Nvidia GPU sales or occasional rewards.

The Nvidia app has optimal settings for many games, but you can skip the optimization if you prefer to tweak game settings yourself. The Nvidia app has six tabs: Home, Drivers, Graphics, System, Redeem, and Settings.

The Home tab will show you if there are new drivers to download and other news, and it also shows your game and program library with two options: Launch and Details. The former will launch your game or app, and the latter will show your current in-game settings and compare them to the Nvidia-optimized options. You can also download other Nvidia tools like iCat, FrameView, and ChatRTX.

The Drivers tab shows you your currently installed driver version, lets you check for updates to install, and also switches between the Game Ready or Studio drivers. The page also has patch notes for the current driver package, including which new games it supports and any major fixes. The Graphics tab shows the currently installed games, their in-game settings, and how they compare to the optimal settings decided by Nvidia.

The System tab duplicates the display settings from the Nvidia Control Panel, so you can enable G-Sync and change resolution and refresh rates here. You can also set RTX Video enhancements and view your system specifications. The performance tab lets you over- or under-clock your GPU for better performance. The Redeem tab shows any available rewards, any you've redeemed in the past, and has an input box for coupon codes, like if you get GeForce Now or other rewards to redeem.

Settings

The Settings tab has three submenus: Features, Notifications, and About. The About tab has privacy controls if you want to reduce the amount of telemetry sent to Nvidia, but you can't completely turn them off. You can also opt-in for beta builds and features here. Notifications does what you'd expect, but the important menu here is the Features one.

That's where you can enable the Nvidia overlay to easily call up ShadowPlay for screen recording, show system performance statistics, and use game filters and photo mode to get insanely good in-game screenshots. 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. There's a toggle for automatically checking for new driver packages and a way to turn off the auto-optimization of game settings if you turned it on when you installed the drivers.

Lots of settings to choose from, but not many that matter for modern hardware

The story of Nvidia Control Panel and the Nvidia app is that while there are many settings to change, only a few of them will likely matter to most users. That's not unique for Nvidia, as AMD's and Intel's driver suites are similarly filled with settings you don't need to worry about.

But within all those irrelevant settings, a few really important ones 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 for game recording. 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 the Nvidia app to edit the most important settings.