Nvidia App’s in-game overlay may be taking up to 15% off your games’ performance

As one of the world’s most valuable companies, Nvidia is uniquely positioned to dominate both the AI and the video game niches. Nvidia is, however, hardly without fault, and its software might be running particularly poorly, to the point of wasting up to 15% of performance potential in games.

News about the Nvidia App’s performance problems broke thanks to Tom’s Hardware. There, Jarred Walton discussed a curious set of findings that suggested that having the App installed and using some of its features could incur a frankly massive 15% performance loss in video games. “Thankfully, the performance decrease isn’t universally 15%, but we tested with the 4060 and saw a 2–12 percent drop in framerates across the five games that we tested,” says the article. These findings were subsequently corroborated by Hardware Unboxed, who discovered a smaller performance differential that was, nevertheless, still present.

In practice, the problem with Nvidia App and Overlays might be more complicated

The problem is seemingly manifold. Nvidia itself has chimed in on the issue saying that “[they] are aware of a reported performance issue related to Game Filters and are actively looking into it.” The official suggestion is that it’s all got to do specifically with the Game Filters feature, which can be manually disabled “from the NVIDIA App Settings > Features > Overlay > Game Filters and Photo Mode, and then [relaunching the game].”

Note that, even though Tom’s Hardware’s findings have revealed a huge performance hit, this doesn’t appear to be present across the board. Hardware Unbox’s testing, which was far more comprehensive, revealed a smaller performance delta that could be alleviated simply by following Nvidia’s instructions. Yet, other users have anecdotally reported substantial losses that could only be resolved by outright uninstalling the new Nvidia App.

On my end, I can verify that there is indeed a problem with the App, but it seems like disabling the overlay (which automatically disables the Filters, too, as they cannot work without one another) and restarting the affected game resolves the delta. Testing on my 10850K/4070 rig, my numbers roughly align with those shown by Hardware Unboxed in Cyberpunk 2077, though they are obviously slightly lower across the board.

It seems like the initial reporting done by Tom’s Hardware might’ve caught multiple problems at once for the performance difference to be quite as substantial as it was on their end. There’s been no mention of which Windows version the test rig had been running on, for example, and we’ve known for a while now that W11 24H2 is a mess when it comes to gaming performance in particular.

Whatever the case may be, I highly recommend disabling the overlay and the Filters for the time being, until Nvidia clears things up on its end. It’s a shame, though, as the Nvidia App is a new and hugely improved version of the old and bloated GeForce Experience. At the very least, the problem’s now been logged, and we can hope that it won’t take too long before it’s fully resolved.

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