Complete guide to Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience

Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience are full of settings, and it can look intimidating. Here's how to navigate these apps.

Whether you use AMD, Intel, or Nvidia GPUs, your graphics card comes with an application that offers additional settings to tweak your GPU. Owners of Nvidia cards have access to the Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience, two programs that enable users to customize their gaming experience even more than with settings that are in individual games. While it looks like there's lots to do in these apps, in reality most options don't really do anything apart from a few key settings. Here's everything you should pay attention to in the Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience.

When opening up the Control Panel for the first time, you'll be greeted with a UI that looks straight out of 2005. That's not an exaggeration either, some icons are literally from Windows XP and some images depict Nvidia GPUs as they existed in the early to mid 2000s. The Control Panel doesn't look modern, and it can be pretty slow to navigate, but at least it works.

On a typical Nvidia GPU, you'll see three primary categories on the left side of the window: 3D Settings, Display, and Video. I'm going to go through these one by one and point out the settings you should keep an eye out for and maybe change, because most of these settings either do nothing most of the time or do so little that they might as well do nothing.

In the 3D Settings category, there are three submenus:

Easily the most important submenu of all these three is Manage 3D Settings, which is full of graphics options you can change. However, most of these settings are also vestiges of a time when driver settings mattered much more for gaming. Today, there's really only three settings you should consider changing:

The Display category has eight whole submenus, and most of them are completely useless. Here's the short version:

There were two submenus here I said were the most important, and the first one is Change Resolution, which shares many of the options that you can do in the regular Windows Settings app, but it also offers a few other important settings. Firstly, you can change the Nvidia color settings, and sometimes your Nvidia GPU by default can use worse color settings. You'll want to set Output color format to RGB and Output dynamic range to Full.

The other thing here that's interesting is the Customize button, which allows you to set a custom resolution and refresh rate. Click on Customize then Create Custom Resolution and then accept Nvidia's terms and conditions, and you pretty much have free rein over your resolution settings. You can even set the resolution higher than your monitor's for a brute force kind of anti-aliasing, or even try and overclock your monitor's refresh rate (which is not something Nvidia officially supports, obviously).

The Set up G-SYNC submenu is also important because it contains more G-SYNC related settings than the Manage 3D Settings submenu contains. Here, you can click a checkbox to enable G-SYNC or G-SYNC Compatible, and then enable it either just in full screen games or both full screen and windowed games (you should definitely enable it in both, by the way). You can also choose to apply settings to a specific monitor if you have multiple that have anti-screen tearing technology.

You may notice a warning that says "Selected Display is not validated as G-SYNC Compatible," but don't worry, that's not actually a bad thing. G-SYNC Compatible is simply Nvidia's label for monitors that use FreeSync or Adaptive Sync that Nvidia has validated or certified, which is just a marketing thing and has nothing to do with whether the anti-screen tearing technology works. If you have a FreeSync or Adaptive Sync display, just enable G-SYNC/G-SYNC Compatible and ignore that warning.

In the Video category, there's only two submenus:

And that's pretty much it for Nvidia Control Panel. There's tons of settings to change here, but the vast majority of them are either non-functional in most applications, or things you wouldn't want to change anyways.

GeForce Experience is an optional app you can install alongside your Nvidia drivers. Before you can start using GeForce Experience, you need to create an account with Nvidia or link one from another platform, like Google. Once you're signed in, GeForce Experience will ask you to let it optimize all your games, and you should probably say no. In most cases, you're probably better off either choosing an in-game preset or changing the settings yourself.

There are two main tabs: Home and Drivers. The Home tab is where you can access your games, and each game has two options: Launch and Details. Clicking on Details will show you a game's current graphics settings and compare them to Nvidia's "optimal" settings, which you can enable by clicking the Optimize button. The Drivers tab is even more limited and just lets you update your drivers. If you want to get to the real settings, you'll have to click on the gear icon next to your username in the top right corner of the window.

The settings menu has four submenus of its own: General, Account, Games & Apps, and Shield. The General tab is the most interesting; you can enable experimental features, automatically download drivers, and apply an image upscaler to your games (this is not the same as DLSS, by the way). But easily the most important option here is for the In-Game Overlay, which is where Shadowplay's recording, instant replay, and broadcasting features are, as well as stuff like a performance overlay. There's yet another settings submenu for the In-Game Overlay you can access here.

On laptops, you'll also see options related to power saving, so you can limit how much power the GPU uses or how loud the fans should get.

The other submenus aren't that important. Under Account you can change your avatar and enable or disable being remembered on your PC, Games & Apps allows you to rescan for games not shown on the Home tab as well as enabling or disabling automatic game optimization, and the Shield submenu allows you to stream your PC games to an Nvidia Shield.

The story of Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience is that while there are many settings to change, only a few of them will likely matter to most users. That's actually not unique for Nvidia, as AMD's and Intel's driver suites are similarly filled with settings you don't really need to worry about.

But within all those irrelevant settings, there are a few really important ones that are crucial in making your GPU as good for gaming as it can be (short of getting a brand-new one), such as enabling G-SYNC and customizing Shadowplay. If you're setting up your PC for the first time, you'll probably want to take a quick look through the Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience to edit the most important settings.

Matthew is a PC Hardware Writer at XDA, having previously written for Digital Trends, Tom's Hardware, and other publications since 2018. He's mainly interested in the three way fight between AMD, Intel, and Nvidia in PCs and servers. He also has a degree in history and linguistics.