Whether you managed to snag a hard-to-find 3080 or are still rocking a 1060, millions of PC gamers rely on Nvidia graphics cards to deliver gorgeous visuals at high frame rates. If you’re one of those people, you can also enjoy the Nvidia GeForce Experience, a suite of free tools designed to enhance your PC gaming experience in numerous ways. Though the software provides some convenient benefits, there’s little here that’s truly necessary or that PC gamers can’t easily find elsewhere.
Getting Started With Nvidia GeForce Experience
If you have a PC with an Nvidia graphics card, you can download the GeForce Experience for free from Nvidia’s website. You just need to create an account and sign in.
The program first scans your computer for compatible games. GeForce Experience doesn’t support every PC game, and not all games support all of its features, but the app supports most recent, major releases. You should check the website for updates when new games get added. Between the start and end of my testing, the troubled Marvel’s Avengers joined the list.
You specify which folders GeForce Experience should scan when looking for games. The program works across PC game stores. My library includes Brawlhalla from Steam, Maneater from the Epic Games Store, Apex Legends from Origin, and even StarCraft II from Battle.net. Note that the games need to be downloaded and installed, not just purchased. Some of my downloads also didn’t show up no matter how many extra folders I scanned, despite appearing on the compatible games list. Browsing through forums, I saw some users had to rename files to get games like Mafia III: Definitive Edition to appear.
Improving Performance
Nvidia knows best how to get the most from its hardware. To test the software’s optimization benefits, I whipped out a five-year-old gaming laptop with a GeForce GTX 850M GPU. You can easily see your PC’s specs right there in the app.
Your can download the latest drivers to prepare your machine for upcoming games by increasing performance and fixing bugs. For existing games, GeForce Experience shows you the settings list that you’re currently using and lets you optimize it by simply clicking an icon. On a laptop, you can change battery settings if you’re plugged or trying to extend battery life. Depending on your hardware, you can prioritize quiet fan speed. You’ll also see if your PC just can’t run a game at all. My old laptop is definitely not ready for virtual reality.
While it’s nice having this information (for some games) all in one spot, I still found myself wanting to fiddle with settings even after “optimizing” them. That might be more of a problem with me than with the software, but I suspect many other PC gamers will behave the same way. You should also know if your rig matches the minimum specs before you buy a game, not after. More useful is the performance overlay that displays frame rate data while gaming. Steam has a frame rate counter, too.
Fun Features
Along with optimizing performance, Nvidia GeForce Experience offers a variety of fun and funky new ways for you to enjoy your freshly optimized PC games. Many games and games consoles now let you take in-game screenshots, but Nvidia’s Ansel photo mode lets you take high-res, 360-degree, HDR, in-game screenshots. With Ansel, you can apply visual filters to change the image’s mood. With Freestyle, another GeForce experience feature, you can apply visual filters within a game as it runs. I used a black-and-white filter with a scratched film effect to turn Maneater’s shark carnage into even more of a 1970s schlock rip-off of Jawse. Fortunately, this post-processing effect didn’t harm performance during my testing.
ShadowPlay offers several ways to record your gameplay sessions. You can simply record indefinitely, or you can turn on Instant Replay to always save the last few seconds or minutes. You can adjust the time frame along with the frame rate and resolution. The Xbox PC app has similar game DVR features. ShadowPlay Highlights, an intelligent recording feature reminiscent of Overwatch’s Play of the Game, supposedly records the most exciting moments automatically. Your results may vary.
GeForce Experience lets you live stream to Facebook, Twitch, and YouTube. That said, I didn’t find using it any more convenient than just directly going to those services and using their provided tools. Those services also let you stream whatever you want, whereas GeForce Experience is limited to the games it supports.
You can use GeForce Experience to locally play your PC games on your TV through GameStream, but you need an Nvidia Shield TV or Shield tablet. Previously, Valve sold Steam Link hardware to stream PC games to your TV, but now that’s handled via a mobile app. The same goes for PlayStation’s Remote Play app. A generous explanation may be that Nvidia needs to use its own hardware to reduce latency, but this feature would be more useful without the extra hardware requirement. Also note that GeForce Experience is different from GeForce Now, Nvidia’s excellent subscription service for playing PC games via the cloud.
Those are GeForce Experience’s current features, but that may change in the future. For a sneak peek, you can opt into its experimental features. For example, the latest update adds even more performance data to the overlay, such as GPU temperature and CPU utilization. Although you can already see this information in Windows 10’s Task Manager, it’s nice easily seeing it in the middle of a game. Also check out our Nvidia GeForce Experience tips on how to get the most from the software.
Experience Nvidia?
Nvidia GeForce Experience is essentially a PC gaming-focused tune-up utility, and like many other tune-up utilities, it has now become a little redundant. Many of its features already come built into the games, stores, and streaming services it interacts with. That said, its performance data is too useful and its recording functionality is too nifty to dismiss it as bloatware. Future experimental features may boost its appeal even more, but don’t feel pressured to download GeForce Experience right away—even if you get your hands on a hot, new Nvidia card.
