After 20 years of service, Nvidia is officially retiring the Nvidia Control Panel for good and replacing it with the Nvidia App. According to the patch notes for Nvidia’s latest Game Ready driver, the control panel will no longer have new features added to it, and will no longer be bundled with the latest Game Ready and Studio drivers for GeForce GPUs. The only exception is RTX Pro GPUs, where Nvidia will keep supporting the control panel until all “professional features” have been migrated to the Nvidia App.
The Nvidia Control Panel will now live in a “maintenance mode” for the foreseeable future. Users who still want to use the Nvidia Control Panel won’t be forced to use outdated Nvidia drivers to keep the control panel installed. Future driver updates will not delete the control panel from a user's PC unless they are installed with the “clean install” method. Nvidia is also keeping the control panel downloadable through the Microsoft Store.
This news represents the accomplishment of Nvidia’s goal to replace the Control Panel and GeForce Experience applications with one application. Nvidia has been slowly migrating control panel features into the Nvidia App since it was unveiled in 2024. Migration of Nvidia control panel tools into the Nvidia App reached a tipping point in 2025 when Nvidia finally moved 3D Settings, Multi-Monitor support, and added offline support for system-level control panel and driver options, leaving almost no features left to migrate to the Nvidia App.
It still remains a mystery why Nvidia took so long to discontinue the control panel (or update it with a better-looking UI), but late is better than never. Likely, competition from AMD’s outgoing iteration of its Adrenalin control panel was what finally incentivized Nvidia to make its own counterpart.
For the vast majority of GeForce users, there is virtually no reason to use the Nvidia control panel anymore or keep it installed. The Nvidia App has all the features you need to tune and optimize games for GeForce GPUs. The app comes with driver-level tuning, but video recording, GPU monitoring, overclocking controls, automatic game optimization, and automated driver updates. That said, it's great to see Nvidia keeping the old control panel around for occasions where the Nvidia app might be buggy.
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