After running the same Nvidia 900 series card for a decade, I finally got around to upgrading to a 5060 Ti. The whole reason I chose Nvidia was because, historically, it's been far better for old games. Forcing settings via Control Panel and Nvidia Inspector worked much more reliably than via the AMD drivers, and there are Nvidia features like SGSSAA that I'd always taken for granted and can't live without. I tried to upgrade to a 6800 XT in 2021 and it was a disaster.

Anyway, I had been watching the gestation of the new "Nvidia App" with a growing sense of dread. I was perfectly happy with the classic Control Panel and knew that the change was going to break things. I had been avoiding the app with my old card, but since I was upgrading, I decided I might as well bite the bullet and make the switch, since Control Panel is effectively EOL.

First impressions of Nvidia App were not as bad as I'd expected. A little bloated, pointlessly spread-out UI vs the compact UI of Control Panel. But I was reassured to see that almost all of the classic Control Panel settings were present in the App. I experienced a moment of naive optimism, until I tried to actually force one of the options in Crysis and discovered that it did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I tried several different settings like AF and V-Sync, and none of them were applied. I double checked that the right exe was selected (the app didn't automatically discover the game so I had to manually create a profile, which I guess should have been the first red flag). I tested the App with a couple of other old games with the same results.

Since Nvidia have generously made the abandoned Control Panel available from the Microsoft Store, I downloaded that just to confirm that I was dealing with an Nvidia App problem and not a fundamental driver problem, or problem with the new hardware just not supporting those features for old games. I forced the same settings via Control Panel and they worked normally in Crysis, so I concluded that Nvidia App was exactly the POS I had feared it would be. Great, so now I have to live in constant fear of Nvidia finally breaking compatibility with the abandoned Control Panel. Unless I can just rely on Inspector...

I installed Inspector to discover that it too had had a UI overhaul. "Whatever, at least it's all the same settings..." But when I tried to force settings via Inspector, those two were ignored! Upon further investigation, I found that the new Inspector settings are linked to the new Nvidia App settings.

TL;DR: Can someone explain to me the relationship between Nvidia App and the classic Control Panel? The new App contains many of the same settings as Control Panel (especially in the Legacy Settings category), but they seem to be front ends for two completely different sets of profiles. Why are they not linked? Why does Nvidia App not work with old games? Why is Inspector also now useless for old games?