ATC wrote on 2026-10-12, 00:59:

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.

I freaking hate the "App" and I'm convince people love dumb crap like this just because it looks new. Everything I needed was in the control panel. It's crap and reminds me of the stupid Radeon adrenalin or whatever it's called that you can't even change the resolution without being redirected to the standard windows settings page.

Sounds a bit like 2003-2006 when they started implementing everything in .NET and it was all broken for 3 years.

Dothan Burger wrote on 2026-10-12, 03:23:

I'm convince people love dumb crap like this just because it looks new.

Yeah, if you look at the reactions to it, people do seem to be excessively concerned with the aesthetics of it.

The new UI looks like it's been designed with touch screens in mind. Very inefficient use of space, with the elements being 3x larger than they need to be. And of course, it's full of ads.

I've noticed the weird behavior of Nvidia Profile Inspector with the Nvidia App as well. In the past, I was able to force older games to use newer versions of DLSS straight from Nvidia Profile Inspector, even if the game in question wasn't greenlit by Nvidia (e.g. Rise of the Tomb Raider). But now, that only seems to work for officially supported titles. Thankfully, I can edit a few files to manually "authorize" any game, but it's still an unnecessary hassle.

And yeah, I agree with what others have said about the needlessly bloated Nvidia App UI. The only good thing about it is that Nvidia Overlay works reasonably well in the recent driver versions. I mostly use that to confirm that my DLSS/DLAA override settings are being properly applied.

More enshittification. Anyone knows what GUI framework it uses?

ATC wrote on 2026-10-12, 00:59:

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 c […]
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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?

nvidia app works with old game but however, I've noticed some weird behavior with the NVIDIA App, and it's not just with older games. For some settings, the changes only take effect after rebooting the OS, not before, whereas with the old Control Panel, they take effect immediately.

I don't know if it's the same issue with the setting you're talking about, but I've had this problem with G-SYNC and anisotropic filtering. Restarting Windows made the changes take effect.

It's annoying to have to restart Windows, but at least the settings are applied.

The old Control Panel still works, even though it's no longer being updated.

As for the NVIDIA App forcing you to manually browse for the correct .exe when you want to create a profile, I'm glad you agree with me that this is a huge regression. I've reported this to NVIDIA several times on their forums and through their feedback program back when the NVIDIA App was in beta, but I get the impression I was the only user who found this particularly annoying, since the issue was never addressed. Fortunately, I can see now that I'm not the only one.

Other users should report this profile issue as well so that NVIDIA will finally fix it. The same goes for the issue with settings not taking effect without having to restart Windows.

I don't like the app, but you can apparently get the old NCP software through the Microsoft Store or likely, you can yank it from the older driver releases and manually install it.