Nvidia just released a big update for its Nvidia app. If you’re unfamiliar, Nvidia has been slowly integrating features and settings from GeForce Experience, the Nvidia Control Panel, and other apps like FrameView and ICAT into a single application, aptly named the Nvidia app, making it easier to manage your graphics card. And the latest update includes a feature that I’ve been wanting for years — driver rollback.
It’s a good idea to keep your GPU drivers up to date. New drivers come with performance improvements, as well as specific optimizations for new game releases. Still, driver releases aren’t perfect. You can almost guarantee that some drivers on some configurations will run into strange bugs or performance issues. Here’s just one example from a Steam user who saw crashes in Ghost of Tsushima after a driver update, and another who saw crashes in Farming Simulator 22. These issues are almost never widespread, but they’re bound to happen to some gamers. Driver rollback gets around the problem.
If you run into performance issues, you can roll back to a previous driver version directly from the Nvidia app. Previously, you’d have to go through a lengthy manual process of removing the old driver from your PC before installing a new driver, or have to use a tool like Display Driver Uninstaller. And even then, you might still run into some driver conflicts. With driver rollback now in the Nvidia app, those issues will hopefully disappear. This is a great feature, though it’s worth noting that you’ll only be able to roll back to drivers installed through the Nvidia app. If you installed the driver manually, you’ll have to remove it manually.
There are some other additions to the Nvidia app with the latest update. For starters, Nvidia has moved the controls for G-Sync out of the Nvidia Control Panel and into its updated app, so you’ll be able to turn on G-Sync and adjust display settings. Nvidia also added RTX HDR support for multi-monitor setups, allowing you to use faux HDR in games that don’t support the feature.
Nvidia added some quality-of-life improvements as well. You can now change the color and layout of your system stats overlay — which Nvidia now calls the Heads Up Display — as well as sort and filter your game library. Nvidia also added a notification to the games library that shows if Digital Rights Management (DRM) software will mess with recording gameplay via ShadowPlay.
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The Nvidia app is still technically in a beta, but it’s free for anyone to download. It lives alongside GeForce Experience and the Nvidia Control Panel, but Nvidia says it plans on migrating features from both of those apps fully to the Nvidia app before the end of the year.
