NVIDIA Launches Major Update to GeForce Experience

I’ll be honest, up until Maxwell was released I was a die-hard AMD fanboy. Who could argue with the cut-price performance compared to the Green team even if the power consumption was higher than expected. I faced very few issues with drivers and every game I owned played (almost) flawlessly. Then came the release of the NVIDIA GTX 970, a wolf in sheeps clothing. Packing enough power to topple the top AMD card and be priced at under £300 just ticked every box and some that I didn’t even know I had such as amazing customer care and support after the purchase. Now I haven’t had to return the product, what I mean is the drivers are updated on a very regular basis and most are WHQL certified to maximise compatibility.

To house all of this support, NVIDIA released GeForce Experience around two years ago. Here gamers could check up on their components, optimise game settings with just a single click and even play games instead of opening the dedicated launcher.

As time progressed, NVIDIA added features such as SHIELD connectivity and streaming to incorporate more of the NVIDIA product family. I’m continually finding new features as I tread the depths of the settings such as LED customisation on my card which I previously understood to have a static LED.

Now the boffins at NVIDIA have decided it’s time to have a bit of a spruce up. With the GeForce Experience utility approaching 300 million downloads since launch and new features being released regularly, we now have the GeForce Experience Beta.

This Beta version will build off what made the original great and make it better, the key two features for me were Streaming with the NVIDIA Shield at 4K AT 60FPS and live broadcasting to Twitch or Youtube Live at 1080p at 60FPS. I guess live streaming is something we already know about through the dedicated programs, but to have drivers, games and streaming through a single program just saves so much time, but 4K streaming from a handheld device is astounding. You can also share what you’re doing, but we all do that on Facebook anyway so I can see this being a lesser used feature personally.

The Beta version is available to download now in hopes that enough people take part and provide feedback for NVIDIA to offer the very best experience ready for the 2015 Holiday season of game sales.

One of the very few drawbacks discussed here was the requirement of an ethernet cable to stream games efficiently on the Shield at 4K, but as we progress into 2016, this may be fixed for a completely wireless experience.