New NVIDIA App Reportedly Causes Massive Performance Drop

After months in beta, the new NVIDIA App was officially released to the public last month. For those who missed it, the app replaces the old GeForce Experience, serving as the primary hub for installing NVIDIA drivers, accessing performance tools and overlays, and enabling RTX filters.

It appears that NVIDIA still has some optimization work to do, as reports have surfaced claiming that the NVIDIA App significantly impacts performance in some games. One such example is the testing of Black Myth: Wukong by Sebastian Castellanos:

Following this, an investigation by Tom's Hardware confirmed reports that the NVIDIA app negatively affects gaming performance, with framerates dropping up to 15% in some cases, which is a significant performance hit. 

In their test, they compared performance with the NVIDIA App running at its default settings (overlay enabled but not in use) against results from a retest where the app's installation was skipped entirely. Here's how the performance changed:

Tom's Hardware made some interesting observations, questioning whether Unreal Engine 5 games were the most impacted, and ultimately recommending that users skip the NVIDIA App for now.

However, as you might also wonder, Digital Trends speculated that the problem could be tied to the overlay. Their test revealed that when the NVIDIA App is kept installed but the NVIDIA overlay is disabled, performance returns to the same level as when the app is completely uninstalled.

It seems that performance improves when the NVIDIA App is uninstalled, but the app itself isn't the cause of the performance loss: it's the overlay, which isn't surprising at all.

The advice to uninstall the NVIDIA App doesn't seem necessary at this point. Even if you disable the overlay, keeping the app installed ensures you'll be notified when new drivers are released, which can help boost your performance.

The NVIDIA team is reportedly aware of the issue and states that they are actively investigating it. They also recommend that users disable overlay features in the NVIDIA app:

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