We are gathered here today in solemn reverence to celebrate our old friend, the Nvidia Control Panel. Okay, so it’s not actually dead. Nvidia has announced its “retirement”, but we all know what that means. Yep, it’s a short walk and a sharp drop, and I’m going to miss the cantankerous old rogue.
“After 20 years of dedicated service, the classic Nvidia Control Panel is officially retiring for Game Ready and Studio Drivers. For Nvidia RTX Pro users, the Nvidia Control Panel will continue to be supported until we have migrated professional features to the Nvidia app,” says the green team in the release notes for the latest GeForce Game Ready 610.47 driver.
“Existing installs of the Nvidia Control Panel will remain on users’ systems, unless they perform a clean installation, and users who still need the Nvidia Control Panel can continue to download it from the Microsoft Store, but we won’t be adding features, fixes, or other changes.”
So, there’s a life support option if you never perform a clean install, or indeed if you feel like resurrecting the old beast from its eternal slumber via the Microsoft Store.
That being said, the writing’s been on the wall for a while now. The Nvidia App is the new hotness, and Nvidia says it’s got all the modern functionality of the Control Panel while “running faster and more efficiently.”
(Image credit: Nvidia)
And in that, the company has a decent point. While I’m pretty sure the Nvidia App can’t do everything the Control Panel can, as someone who interacts with it on a daily basis, I can say it’s pretty good. A little charmless, perhaps. But otherwise, it’s a perfectly decent interface between you, your games, and your graphics card.
I do have a couple of thoughts, though. For one, what about the millions of performance and fix guides permeating the internet that start off with the phrase “Open the Nvidia Control Panel, and adjust XYZ”? All that knowledge lost, like tears in rain. There are likely equivalent settings in the NV app, but for beginner users, it can still be a cavalcade of esoteric labels that don’t immediately describe their purpose.
And two, the Nvidia App can be quite an online-focused affair in a way the old Control Panel was not. Besides the greyed-out checkbox in the Privacy settings labelled “required data” (something Nvidia explains is “Data that is necessary for Nvidia App to operate and cannot be switched off”), it can also lag quite badly on an unstable connection. In my personal experience, anyway.
(Image credit: Nvidia)
Still, change comes for us all. I’ll miss the Control Panel’s classic rotating 3D image preview, the charmingly old-school HDCP menu that shows a rendering of an ancient Nvidia GPU plugged into what looks suspiciously like a plasma TV, and of course, the old Global Settings and Program Settings tabs with all of their many intricacies.
But is it progress? Perhaps. You can pry the Windows Control Panel from my cold, dead hands, though. That old clunker simply refuses to die, although I don’t think it’ll be that long before I write a similar obituary.
The wind of change blows straight into the face of time, or something along those lines. Rest easy now, brave soldier. Your watch has ended, and I salute your service.
