Your Thoughts On Geforce Experience & AMD Gaming Evolved

[Jiggle Counter]

I love any program that sits in my tray, checks for updates every week, and warns me about it.

That's probably the ONLY thing I love about those two programs, keeping my drivers and graphical libraries up to date.

The first time I used Geforce Experience, I was skeptical about their new 'Game Optimizer'

I'll give you an example;

I have a GTX 660ti. My monitor has a native resolution of 1366x768, so I don't need that much GPU horsepower.
Because of my lower-than-usual resolution, I'm able to crank up the graphics to max, and chew out more than 60fps on every game I own.
The Geforce Experience Game Optimizer, however, wants to CHANGE my graphical options to medium.
Why? I dunno, my monitor is 60hz, it totally makes sense that Nvidia wants the game to run at a smooth 300fps, even though I won't visibly notice it, I'll just see that my textures are crappier and my shadows are turned off.

Anyway, I always turn that feature off, it's useless. I think it's for people who have no idea how to optimize graphical options by themselves.

My partner has an AMD Radeon HD 6950, and so I installed AMD Gaming Evolved to test it out.

Holy crap, there's ads, and chatrooms, and some kind of weird score system, and a shop, and some form of game optimizer, and even an in-game OVERLAY.

I quickly turned EVERY feature off, apart from the automatic update.

The next time it updated, all the features re-enabled themselves. So I uninstalled the bastard.

What are your thoughts on these two applications? Why does AMD give me bloatware?

 

[Kahani]

Anyway, I always turn that feature off, it's useless. I think it's for people who have no idea how to optimize graphical options by themselves.

Basically this. If you have any idea what you're doing, Geforce Experience sucks. There are simply not enough options for it. Or any at all for that matter. Either you have the settings it says or you don't, with no scope for actually playing around with individual things or telling it you don't actually care about always having exactly 60fps. Fortunately you can still do all that through the Nvidia control panel (including sli and other things I don't think Experience looks at at all), so Experience is basically pointless.

That said, it does have things like framerate monitoring and recording functions that are apparently a lot less resource intensive than third party ones like fraps. Unfortunately they only work with newer GPUs than mine, but people like Total Biscuit seem to think they're pretty good.

 

[Ishigami]

I don?t mind GeForce Experience.
The recording feature is nice and much less performance demanding than let?s say Fraps. That is if it works.
The driver update notification is comfortable.
As for the Game Optimizer: I don?t really need it as my machine can run basically any game in max settings (780Ti SLI) none the less I think it is comfortable.
I?ve seen it working on less powerful machines and it does a good job getting a smooth experience on most games. Nvidia certainly knows how their own graphic accelerators perform and however they determine the settings seems to work in general.
Of course there an odd one out or it takes a bit of time after launch till better settings are available but overall it makes PC gaming much more approachable for a more casual audience who couldn?t care less what a setting does and how it affects the performance.

Can?t say about AMD Gaming Evolved.
My last accelerator from ATI/AMD was in 2002 (ATI 9800). My ATI/AMD accelerators gave me too much grief while I was always content with my Nvidia cards.
Mantle is interesting and I am grateful that AMD basically pushes Microsoft to finally evolve their aging DirectX with simple competition. But in the end I think DirectX12 will probably render Mantle mostly mute since it will be hardware brand independent.
However AMD approach on FreeSync is commendable and will render Nvidias GSync pointless in the future.
But I digress.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

I just use it to keep my drivers up to date. It's handy in that regard and not too intrusive so I'm fine with it.

 

[Jiggle Counter]

I just use it to keep my drivers up to date. It's handy in that regard and not too intrusive so I'm fine with it.

Which one?

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

I just use it to keep my drivers up to date. It's handy in that regard and not too intrusive so I'm fine with it.

Which one?

I believe Geforce Experience takes care of video, 3D, audio, and direct x drivers. When Nvidia tells me there are new drivers I click "express installation" and a minute or so later I'm all updated and good to go.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

eh yeah OP, don't use that gaming evolved crap, the catalyst control center (which came out years ago and has been the standard since for AMD) is all you need and works quite well IMO, I've yet to have any troubles and I can tweak just about whatever I want to from there, including for multi-monitor setups and many other things.

not to make it sound complicated, most users won't even touch those things nor are they thrown at your face, there is a simple "express install" anytime you have to update your drivers and it's never given me a problem.

 

[seris]

i take AMD gaming evolved off my autostart, and if i can i choose to not install it at all. All i need is CCC and im fine, i dont need another in game overlay ontop of the steam overlay.

 

[K-lusive]

AMD's Catalyst control centre is a pain to install, re-install and alter. Downloading downloaders, asking you for folder locations then using their default anyway (or worse: as well) and int he end you have to hope it actually works. I've spent an entire weekend re-installing windows over and over until it properly installed the drivers for my HD7970 and my monitor no longer had thick black bars on all sides.

My current nVidia card (gefore 650) says it can install and use Shadowplay, except when I try to enable it, the switch turns back of after a second or two. Besides, an nVidia driver occasinally freezes my pc a few seconds after the desktop shows, leading to BSOD's.

Both of these 'user experience' bloatware programs disappoint me.