GPU App Showdown: AMD vs NVIDIA

Nvidia GeForce Experience

Now let’s move onto Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software. Unlike AMD’s Gaming Evolved app there’s no home screen with shortcuts to all the different aspects of the software, instead it jumps straight into the game library. From within here we can see it does the same as the Gaming Evolved App and scans your entire PC for games. Like with Raptr this scan will find Steam, Origin, UPlay and standalone games on your system. From within this tab you can also optimise your game settings which is calculated in an identical way to the way Raptr does it: Nvidia collects data based on the configurations of thousands of systems running certain games with various hardware configurations and then calculates the optimal settings required to get a fluid gaming experience.

Under the drivers tab the software will automatically search for the latest WHQL and beta driver releases. You can stick to WHQL and exclude betas if you want the latest stable releases. From here you can download and install the latest driver quite quickly and easily.

The next tab along is called “My Rig” where it lists your hardware specifications. This tab also contains entry into the LED visualiser area where you can configure the lighting pattern on supported Nvidia GeForce GTX graphics cards. For example stock GTX 770, GTX 780, GTX 780 Ti, GTX Titan, GTX Titan Black, GTX Titan Z and Nvidia’s special SLI bridge all have green LED lighting. With the LED visualiser you can tweak the brightness and lighting effects of these LED lights.

Moving along to the preferences tab and there are lots of options here to fine tune the user experience.

Under the ShadowPlay tab you can obviously fine tune aspects of ShadowPlay which we’ll discuss more in a moment.

In the GameStream tab you can stream your games from your PC to any Nvidia Shield 1 or 2 devices. This can be done using just your local network or with the internet too meaning you can visit a friends house with your Shield, leave your PC on at home and play your PC games out and about. You will of course need some fairly fast internet for this as we discovered in our in-depth Nvidia Shield testing.

ShadowPlay is Nvidia’s equivalent to AMD’s Game DVR but it is slightly more developed. By that I mean there is much more functionality on offer, for example you can support unlimited recording times not be restricted to just 10 minutes. There’s also a variety of audio recording options and modes you can set. Check out our full in-depth review of Nvidia’s ShadowPlay software right here.

Nvidia’s GeForce Experience software is fairly diminutive in terms of its hard drive foot print. The main reason for this is that some of its features are also part of the main Nvidia GeForce Control Panel which gets installed whether you choose to install the GeForce Experience software or not. However, in literal terms the installation of GeForce Experience is about one tenth of the size of AMD’s Gaming Evolved App: although both are so small it really is irrelevant.