Nvidia recently updated some of its clutter of PC apps, including the GPU-controlling GeForce Experience, to a single Nvidia App. And while that makes for fewer icons in your system tray, it seems the new program’s AI features are potentially harming your gaming framerates.
Tom’s Hardware investigated the issue itself, and in its testing of the new Nvidia App, found that it’s potentially reducing game performance by 15 percent. However, that’s on default settings, and there’s a way to fix it—by disabling the AI-driven Game Filters setting.
The term “AI” now means so many different things, even just within the field of gaming, that it’s deeply unhelpful. It’s used to describe the programmed behavior of in-game characters and systems. It’s the name given to large language models that scrape other people’s work to generate derivative, plagiarized work. And it’s used to define any “learning” program that adapts itself based on experience. It’s the latter that’s relevant here, what Nvidia describes as “game enhancing filters, including innovative new AI-powered filters for RTX users.” It seems that, since the switch from GeForce Experience, it’s this feature that’s causing some serious issues.
Game Filters aren’t new—they were a feature in GeForce Experience and known as Nvidia Freestyle, and by all accounts it was a suite of settings worth fiddling with to get the most out of specific games. It’s just, with the new Nvidia App, the setting is set to on by default, and whatever fancy new “AI-powered” elements it includes are causing these significant hits to performance, even when it’s sitting idly in the background. Nvidia told Tom’s Hardware that they’re now aware of the issue, and in the meantime explain how to switch it off:
You can turn off Game Filters from the NVIDIA App Settings > Features > Overlay > Game Filters and Photo Mode, and then relaunch your game.
Of course, there’s an even more effective means of avoiding the issues: you can just uninstall the app altogether. As someone who has become lazily reliant on GeForce Experience/Nvidia App to notify me when a new Nvidia driver is available (something you really do need to stay on top of if you want to avoid issues with the latest games), it’s become a default application on my PC. It’s a useful reminder that you don’t actually need it—you can just visit Nvidia’s driver page and download the latest drivers whenever you fancy. Like we all did in the Olden Days.
(Nvidia, despite wholly retiring Experience with the latest driver release, still hasn’t updated many of its web pages to acknowledge this, the driver site still suggesting you install it, while explanatory pages about the Game Filters all list it as an Experience feature.)
A 15-percent increase in dropped framerates is more significant than it might first sound. As Tom’s Hardware usefully explains, the difference in performance between the super-fancy RTX 4060 Ti and the $100-cheaper RTX 4060 is 18 percent.
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