The end of the old days
Questions about when will Nvidia modernize the control panel for graphics cards have been around since a decade ago. They were only answered this year when Nvidia unveiled a beta version of the successor to the control panel and the GeForce experience. We take a look at one of the new features it offers – OSD, HUD, in short an overlay window that, alongside the usual monitoring values, can display real-time PC latencies.
One of the things that Nvidia has long been criticized for, especially by AMD fans, is the archaic control panel in graphics card drivers that dates back to Windows XP and ForceWare. It appeared in its current form sometime in April 2007 with the launch of the GeForce 8600 GTS and has survived with only minimal changes since then. Below are screenshots of the version localized into Czech, you probably know the English one intimately.
The compact interface from the days when monitors were still small and you couldn’t slide your finger across displays is still more comfortable to me than the modern interfaces with huge buttons that only allow ten buttons to fit on a control panel on a 24-inch screen. In applications with large control elements, you have to split all the settings into several tabs and stack subtabs on top of them. It’s then probably not many people who can get through all the settings on the first try.
I guess the appearance of the control panel would not have been that much of a problem, but what is worse is that it has not been further developed and new functions have not been added in nearly twenty years. Nvidia separated the new features into separate applications – leaving overclocking to the card manufacturers’ utility apps and adding new features to GeForce Experience.
AMD, meanwhile, has integrated everything into Radeon Software. They added an overlay panel, sections for overclocking and tuning the card, monitoring and a bunch of other stuff. The lack of similar features in Nvidia’s old control panel has become a fruitful talking point. Even AMD can’t resist the occasional tease in presentations that with Radeons, you also get modern software that works without registration (this is again a jab at GeForce Experience, which requires an Nvidia account).
It wasn’t until this year that Nvidia took the plunge and released a beta version of the upcoming application, which is intended to replace both the original GeForce control panels and the more recent GeForce Experience. It will offer a modern interface, do without the need to be logged in, new features will be added and some of the lesser used ones will disappear. The app is still in development, so it’s likely that many more features will be added, some will change, some will move, and some will disappear since the time of the article’s release.
Today we’ll take a quick look at the basics of the new application and one of the new features – an HUD for displaying monitoring data. This will loosely follow up on the article on latency measurement.
If you dig deep enough into the settings, you’ll find that it can display more values than is obvious at first glance. In games with the Reflex API, you can, on the overlay data from the Nvidia app, now see, in addition to the usual data, the real-time system latency, i.e. how long it takes the game to respond to input from the controller.
You can download the beta version of the Nvidia App directly from the Nvidia website. The installation is easy, just keep an eye on the status of the switches. By default, automatic optimisation of installed games and apps is active. If you don’t want Nvidia to change your current game settings to different ones based on the hardware you’re using, disable Optimize games and creative apps. I myself missed that it was a switch when I first installed it. You won’t lose anything, you can optimize the settings at any time.
In the current version of the application 11.0.1.147, there are six main items and additional tabs:
- Home
- Drivers
- Graphics
- Program Settings
- Global Settings
- System
- Displays
- Video
- Performance
- My Rig
- Redeem
- Settings
- Features
- Notifications
- About
Screenshots of all the tabs with the options they offer in the current version of the Nvidia App are below. There is still missing video settings, for example.
In the next chapter, we will get into the basic setup. The default one is extremely annoying if you are a user of a two-panel file manager like Total Commander. In fact, number of keyboard shortcuts from the Nvidia App will conflict with usual file manager shortcuts, and a you might not be able to find where to change them quickly.
⠀