Nvidia's new PC gaming app is making games run worse, but there's a quick fix
Nvidia got PC gamers a questionable holiday gift this year: worse performance in their games.
That's according to testing done by Tom's Hardware, who found that playing PC games while running the recently launched Nvidia desktop app can reduce in-game frame rates by as much as 15 percent in some cases. Tom's Hardware tried this out with several different games, including Black Myth Wukong and Baldur's Gate 3, and found performance dips of varying degrees in all of them.
So, what the heck is going on here? It turns out that the Nvidia app, which Nvidia launched last month to give users a one-stop shop for downloading new drivers and whatnot, has some AI-fueled "game filters" that are theoretically supposed to make games look a little better. These are turned on by default, and if they're on, they can reduce frame rates in games, even when the filters aren't being applied to the game in question.
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Nvidia gave a statement to Tom's Hardware acknowledging the issue and giving simple instructions for how to turn the feature off and fix your performance problems:
Open the Nvidia app and go to Settings
Go to Features
Go to Overlay
Go to Game Filters and Photo Mode and turn off the game filters
Apparently, this will cure what ails you. Good luck, gamers.
Topics Gaming
Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. Alex can be found on Bluesky at yelix.bsky.social.
