I let Nvidia's GeForce Experience optimize my games. Here's how it went.

Summary

• Nvidia's GeForce Experience game optimizer is surprisingly easy to set up and use, making it accessible for beginners who may not be familiar with game optimization and graphics settings.
• The optimizer does a decent job of adjusting settings for better performance without sacrificing too much visual fidelity. It knows the right settings to tweak to achieve good framerates on demanding games like Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077.
• The tool provides helpful descriptions and screenshots of the settings being adjusted, making it easier for users to understand the impact.

2023 was a pretty good year for video games, with a ton of big, excellent games finally getting released. Thankfully, a lot of them were released on consoles. It was a particularly painful year to be a PC gamer, with a surprising number of PC versions shipping with issues just being poorly optimized to run on even the most powerful gaming PCs.

Not all titles were downright unplayable, thankfully, and it was easy to salvage a lot of them with the right tweaks. I prefer optimizing the games myself, but I hate having to go through the pain of optimizing each game before jumping into the action. This is what triggered me to try Nvidia's built-in game optimizer, a tool that I used to rely heavily on back in the days when it was relatively easy to run games on a PC without having to second guess the hardware. But is the built-in game optimizer in Nvidia GeForce Experience utility reliable in 2023 with all of these complicated, modern titles?

Surprisingly easy to set up

Very approachable for beginners

The best thing about the GeForce Experience game optimizer is that it's very easy to use. All you have to do is select the target resolution, the display mode, and the kind of optimization you're looking for: Performance, Quality, or Optimal, the latter of which is the middle ground between the two. The optimizer will then tweak the settings in real time based on your selection. There's also a handy launch button to let you run your optimized games and see how they perform.

The overall process is just as simple as I remember it being a few years ago. It's especially great for beginners who might not know their way around game optimization and graphics settings.

Optimizing the games with GeForce Experience

This is all great, but is it even worth using the tool? I tried optimizing two different games using the GeForce Experience. Here are the results.

Adjusts more than preset settings

Alan Wake 2 is one of the most demanding titles out there right now, so I decided to see how the GeForce Experience optimized it. The Optimal settings suggested for this particular game on my PC with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Ti were close to the settings I had manually adjusted myself. That's a good start because it means the utility knows the right settings to tweak to get good framerates.

I manually optimized Alan Wake 2 to average around 72FPS on my PC with a combination of High and Ultra graphics settings, complete with DLSS and Ray Reconstruction. However, the Optimal settings did disable or lower a couple of options, like post-processing quality, to add more frames to the board. While the GeForce optimization didn't add too many frames, I was able to consistently get more than 80FPS without a noticeable hit to the visual fidelity. In fact, tweaking the optimization slide just a few more notches to optimize more for performance instantly delivered better results.

I observed similar behavior with Cyberpunk 2077, another demanding title that may take a lot of effort to run smoothly on even the highest-end rigs. The optimized settings suggested by GeForce Experience for Cyberpunk 2077 were also close to those I chose for smooth performance. Cyberpunk 2077 averaged 95FPS with my manual tweaks, whereas the GeForce Experience was able to adjust it to an average of 101FPS. I was able to further improve it by turning the slider a couple of more notches in favor of performance. With GeForce Experience optimized settings, the game now runs at around 130FPS. I don't see a drastic difference in visual fidelity, albeit in a few places.

I like how the GeForce Experience utility gives you a description of the settings you're changing, along with screenshots from the game to show exactly what you're tweaking. This makes it easier for beginners to understand what they're looking at and what kind of impact it'll have on visual fidelity.

I also tried optimizing other titles like Apex Legends and The Finals using the GeForce Experience, and they were all adjusted to run at max settings by default. These titles, however, are known to run quite smoothly on PC, to begin with, so I wouldn't necessarily judge how the utility works based on those optimizations.

So, should you use GeForce Experience?

The built-in optimizer in GeForce Experience turned out better than I thought when it comes to graphics optimization. Not only does it make it easy to understand the settings you're tweaking and give you optimal settings based on the hardware, but it also applies those settings promptly for instant results. The optimization itself was pretty reliable, too. It did change a few settings I wouldn't personally tweak, but I am glad the performance improvement didn't come at a significant cost of visual fidelity. Both Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077 looked great even with all the adjusted settings, meaning the optimizer isn't randomizing to some preset values.

I like having more control over the graphics and other in-game settings, but I can see myself using the game optimizer in the future when I want to quickly jump into a game without spending too much time on settings. More importantly, it's a fantastic tool for beginners that will not only allow them to get better performance out of their machines but also help them understand the settings in detail.