Sacrificing The Functional For The ‘Modern’ Once Again

Ars Technica did some digging and figure that we first saw NVIDIA’s Control Panel in 2006, around the time the 7x00GS/GT/GTX series were shiny and new.  Tangentially, this is part of why old techs are always grumpy; this is not the RTX 7×00 series, those are totally different.  Anyway, that Control Panel has served NVIDIA users well, as it has always been just a few clicks away and gave you control over just about anything you wanted, from NVIDIA Surround to global quality settings to fine control over colour curves.

Unfortunately that was apparently too useful and NVIDIA didn’t want to learn from the negative feedback AMD got when they did something similar years ago.

If you currently run an NVIDIA card, they won’t strip the Control Panel from your machine but if you are doing a fresh install the driver will no longer include it.  Instead all new drivers will include the 45MB NVIDIA app, with the exception of their Developer branch of drivers which will continue to include the classic Control Panel.  There are some benefits to the NVIDIA app, as it gives you better control over DLSS versions and a way to update your drivers.

You can still find the classic NVIDIA Control Panel on the Microsoft Store if you do a fresh install and would like that control back, but NVIDIA has stated it will be unsupported.  On the plus side that means it won’t be updated either.

Farewell old friend.