The NVIDIA app on Windows 11 could be sapping performance out of your PC games

An investigation by Tom's Hardware has shown up some troubling performance decreases by running the latest NVIDIA app while you game.

There's an app or launcher for everything, it seems when it comes to PC gaming, but in this case, a tool that should make your life easier could be doing the exact opposite.

The NVIDIA app is what the old GeForce Experience has morphed into, and after a lengthy beta, you would have hoped all the kinks were worked out. An investigation by our pals over at Tom's Hardware, however, suggests this is not the case.

In their testing, they found that running the NVIDIA app while you're gaming could result in a pretty significant degradation in performance.

It isn't a flat drop across the board, nothing in PC gaming is ever that black and white. But in the Tom's Hardware testing of a variety of games, it seemed that Assassin's Creed: Mirage was the worst affected on their test system using the RTX 4060.

Other titles including Black Myth: Wukong, and Flight Simulator 2024 saw similar results when run at 1080p, medium settings, which is the sweet spot for what a lot of folks using this card will probably be playing at.

Of course, this is just one card and a handful of games, but the results back up what many out there in the wider world of the internet have been saying. The old GeForce Experience app wasn't anything to write home about, but for the most part, nobody ever really complained about it hurting their games.

The NVIDIA app is supposed to help gamers optimize their experience, but right now it appears it could be doing the opposite. If you're seeing similar effects yourself, the best recommendation right now would be to uninstall the app and do a clean install of the latest drivers from the NVIDIA website. Hopefully the boffins at NVIDIA HQ figure out what's causing this soon enough.