We tested gaming performance using Nvidia’s new “Nvidia App” (which is installed by default with the driver package) and found that it reduced performance by up to 15% in some games.
renew: Nvidia sent us a statement: “We are aware of the reported performance issue related to Game Filters and are actively investigating the issue. You can download this from NVIDIA Application Settings > Features > Overlays > Game Filters and Photo Mode Turn off game filters in , then restart your game.
We’ve tested this and confirmed that disabling game filters and photo mode does work. The problem seems to be caused by the filter causing a loss of performance. even if they are not actively used. (With GeForce Experience, if you don’t have any game filters enabled, there will be no performance impact.) So if you’re only after the video capture features or game optimizations provided by the Nvidia App, you can get “normal” by disabling filters. Mirror and photo modes to improve performance.
when Nvidia launched 566.14 driver last monthwhich officially puts GeForce Experience (GFE) into legacy status. The first time you load GFE using 566.14, it will prompt you to update to the new Nvidia application. You can decline, but there will be no future updates to GFE. along with 566.36 driver, Nvidia completely removes GFE And only the Nvidia app – or you can run it without the extra features it offers and just install the driver.
If you don’t need the extra software, skipping the Nvidia app can avoid this clutter, which is why many people don’t install GeForce Experience. We’ve confirmed reports online that Nvidia apps using default settings may impact game performance, with framerate drops of up to 15% in some cases.
If it’s not immediately obvious, 15% are significant performance drops caused by driver or application updates. To put things in perspective, the more expensive RTX 4060 Ti is only 18% faster than the base model RTX 4060, according to our data GPU benchmarksboth running at 1080p medium settings. Thankfully, performance drops of 15% aren’t universal, but we tested with the 4060 and found framerate drops of 2-12% across the five games we tested.
We used the most recent data Intel Arc B580 Reviewand then retested some games after installing clean drivers without installing Nvidia apps as part of the package. Nvidia applications initially run with default settings (i.e. overlay enabled, but not actively using it).
Below are our updated test results. Turning off game filters but leaving Nvidia apps (and overlays) is blue, not running Nvidia apps is green, and defaults (Nvidia apps with filters and photo mode enabled) are gray. Here’s the performance summary.
The overall chart shows that disabling the gaming filter or running without Nvidia apps results in the same performance – within the margin of error (less than 1% difference). However, using the Nvidia App’s default settings, performance dropped by about 6% at 1080p and 2.5% at 1440p. Of course, the extent of the impact varies from game to game.
In all the games we examined, not having Nvidia apps installed improved performance. We expect 1080p media to show the largest increase, as this is more of a CPU-limited case, but the performance impact is mostly independent of the settings and resolutions we tested. Some games have a smaller impact on performance, some more, and of course we’re only talking about one set of hardware tested. But it is obvious that the decrease in effective performance is not small.
Some believe that Unreal Engine 5 games are affected the most, but from our data, the biggest loser is Assassin’s Creed Phantoms, which dropped 9% at 1080p medium resolution and 12% at 1080p ultra resolution. %, down 6% at 1440p super resolution. STALKER 2 also lost about 6% (ignoring 1440p super resolution, where VRAM is an obvious issue), while Wukong “only” lost about 2-6%. The click-through rate of the DirectX 11 game “Baldur’s Gate 3” is 3% to 4%, and the click-through rate of “Flight Simulation 2024” at 1080p also dropped by 6%.
To be sure, the performance penalty will vary across different CPUs and GPUs, but we can’t say exactly how much without further testing. At least one user reported a performance loss of up to 15% in Black Myth: Wukong when testing the RTX 4080 Super with a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, so higher-performance GPUs may be affected even more.
We reached out to Nvidia for comment, and they got back to us later that day. As you can read in the update at the top, the root cause appears to be related to enabled game filters and photo mode, regardless of whether any filters are actually active. Disabling this option can fix the performance loss if you don’t use either feature. Alternatively, if you don’t need the extra functionality the app offers, you can do Clean driver installation Skip Nvidia apps for now. We assume there will be a more permanent fix that doesn’t require disabling these features in future drivers.