The two primary apps for tweaking NVIDIA GPUs are the NVIDIA Control Panel and GeForce Experience.

They perform several functions, chief among them customizing graphics prefs.

Luckily, these apps are free and take little effort to install on your PC.

Performance and Quality Balance on the NVIDIA control panel

Generally, tweaking them to obtain a higher graphical fidelity often comes at a performance cost.

Anti-Aliasing

Most games allow you to adjust the screen resolution at which they are rendered.

However, not all of them swap out textures to match the current resolution.

Geforce performance and quality slider

This phenomenon, known as aliasing, shows up when the display equipment cannot render smooth lines correctly.

Each has advantages and disadvantages, but temporal anti-aliasing is fast becoming the norm.

It powersNVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FidelityFX.

Setting the default graphic processor in the NVIDIA control panel

Screen tearing is characterized by rendered portions of multiple frames and ugly horizontal lines across the screen.

Anisotropic filtering enhances textures' image quality on surfaces at oblique angles to the viewing plane.

Each value represents the samples collected per texture element or texel.

Program settings on the NVIDIA Control Panel

It calculates the exposure of each geometry surface in the scene to ambient lighting and darkens the shaded areas.

This feature helps detect subtle lighting variations and expose minute surface details.

For example, enabling ambient occlusion can enhance bumps and ridges on rough surface textures like wood and concrete.

NVIDIA Control Panel Graphics Settings

It also helps to soften light sources that are uncomfortably bright.

Ambient occlusion works similarly to ray tracing, as it casts rays to sample the surfaces of nearby geometries.

Screen Resolution

Choosing thebest display resolution for your gamelargely depends on your monitor.

GeForce Experience Settings

Most games detect the native resolution for your display rig and can render frames at that resolution or below.

For instance, 4K monitors can render at Full HD and Standard HD.

A higher screen resolution results in sharper images and higher frame rates.

However, it can impact performance and loading times since the game uses high-quality textures.

Performance/Quality Balance

Most gamers' primary concern when tweaking graphics options is how they affect performance.

This fear is not unfounded, as higher graphics quality often comes at a performance cost and reduced FPS.

After this, you’re able to move the slider between performance and quality.

The 3D preview image provides real-time feedback on the effects of your setting.

ClickApplyto back up your changes.

It’s worth noting that this slider is a global setting that affects all games and graphics applications.

This section contains a slider that you could use to balance between performance and quality.

After moving the slider, clickAPPLYto stash your changes.

Depending on the game, power controls, and processing requirements, your PC automatically switches between them.

Also, you should note that this setting is only available on the NVIDIA Control Panel.

So, open it and navigate to theManage 3D settingsmenu.

Then, select theGlobal Settingstab.

Next, find thePreferred graphics processorsetting and select your desired graphics card.

Doing this would set all graphics applications on your PC to use this processor.

Select theProgram Settingstab to use a different processor for specific applications.

From there, snag the app from the drop-down menu.

you’re able to also add it from its installation folder if it’s not on the list.

On the other hand, it’s possible for you to only enable NVIDIA Reflex on GeForce Experience.

To avoid conflicts, it’s best to use the same selections for prefs common to both software.

Unlike the NVIDIA Control Panel, GeForce Experience does not provide global prefs for all games and graphics applications.

Instead, you must customize the parameters for each game individually.

If youre on a laptop, GeForce Experience also allows you to use separate controls forPlugged inandOn batterymodes.

More importantly, many gamers use the in-game overlay Geforce Experience provides to record and stream gameplay.