Best Nvidia Control Panel Settings – Comprehensive Guide 2023

The Nvidia Control Panel offers control over the driver’s graphics settings and various other features. If you have an NVidia GPU in your PC build, then you need to jump into the Nvidia Control Panel to dial in the correct and optimal settings.

If you don’t optimize your NVidia Control Panel settings, then you are simply missing out on FPS improvements, graphics quality improvements, lower latency, as well as general graphics card optimizations for gaming.

When you first install the Nvidia control panel on your computer(Or it gets installed automatically by Windows updates), all graphics settings are already preconfigured by Nvidia. But that doesn’t mean that they are the best for your system.

Don’t worry, though; in this post, I will go in-depth on how to properly configure and optimize your Nvidia Control Panel settings to achieve the maximum performance possible, FPS boost in games, less input lag, fix shuttering, flickering, and fps drops.

Before you optimize the Nvidia Control panel settings, I highly recommend uninstalling any previous drivers and downloading and installing the latest Nvidia driver on your computer. So, let’s start.

How to download and install the latest Nvidia drivers

Head to Nvidia’s official download page and complete the form depending on your GPU model. Below you can find an example of what it should look like.

At the option “Download Type” option, choose Game Ready Drivers if you are a gamer who prioritizes the latest game titles support, performance gains, DLC support, etc..

On the other hand, if you are a content creator who prioritizes creative workflows, including animation, video editing, graphic design, live streaming, etc., choose Studio Drivers. If you do both, then I recommend you choose Game Ready Drivers.

Once you’ve completed the form, go ahead and press the “Search” button, and you will be redirected to a page with the latest Driver available for your GPU. Click the “Download” button and wait for the driver to download.

Once you’ve downloaded the driver, locate the file, “Right-click” on it, and choose “Run as administrator”.

You may be asked if you want to install the driver and Nvidia GeForce on your computer. If you do not use Nvidia GeForce, I recommend installing the driver alone. Once you choose your option, click on the “AGREE AND CONTINUE” button.

The next tab will ask you how you want to proceed with your installation.

Choose Custom installation and click Next.

Unmark any feature you don’t need and make sure to tick the option “Perform a clean installation” and click on the “NEXT” button.

Now your screen may start flickering and the screen goes black for a few seconds; that’s normal.

Once the installation is completed, restart your PC and come back to this post so you start optimizing the Nvidia settings.

Best NVIDIA Control Panel settings

Assuming you got your NVidia GPU driver installed, you can go to your Desktop, right-click, and then select “NVidia Control Panel” to open up the panel itself, where you can adjust the settings.

Best NVidia Control Panel 3D Settings

Click on the “Use the advanced 3D image settings” option, and click Apply.

Then move to “Manage 3D settings” tab. Below I will go through all the settings one by one.

Image Scaling

Image Scaling replaced the old option called Image Sharpening. Image Scaling will basically downscale the resolution and then sharpen the image. It reminds me of DLSS, but it’s not even close. Just keep it disabled.

Recommendation: OFF.

Increases the overall sharpness and details of the application

Ambient Occlusion

Keep it off on the NVidia Control Panel, and if you really want to enable it, do it through the specific game that you play. It sort of makes the shadows look a little better, but it’s not worth it.

Recommendation: Off

Anisotropic Filtering

Turn it off here and enable it in the game if you need it. It makes everything sharper, clearer, and look better. In most FPS games that support it, I recommend enabling it(in-game).

If you enable it on the NVidia Control Panel and you start noticing weird graphics in-game, it could be that the game you are playing does not support Anisotropic Filtering.

Recommendation: Off

Antialiasing – FXAA

“Budget” less FPS taxing anti-aliasing option. Keep it off.

Recommendation: Off

Antialiasing – Gamma correction

This setting will do nothing to almost any game/app. Almost every modern game and app has Gamma Correction already enabled. Useless setting; keep it off.

Recommendation: Off

Antialiasing – Mode

As I said above, just keep it OFF and mess with it in-game.

Recommendation: Off

Antialiasing – Setting

Recommendation: None

Antialiasing – Transparency

Doe’s nothing, so keep it off.

Recommendation: Off

Background Application Max Frame Rate

What this does is if you are in a game and you alt+tab out of the game , then having this setting set will cap the FPS when you tab out. But it only works for Windowed mode or Borderless. If you are playing the game in full-screen, this setting will not work.

Recommendation: Off

CUDA – GPUs

If you have only one GPU, you can skip this setting. If you have multiple GPUs, select the most powerful one because if you run a GPU accelerated application that uses CUDA, it will come and use that specific one.

Recommendation: All

DSR – Factors

Dynamic Super Resolution(DSR) should be set to OFF unless you know what you are doing.

Recommendation: Off

DSR – Smoothness

Recommendation: Off

Low Latency Mode

If the game has a built-in NVidia Reflex Low Latency setting, then turn it OFF in the NVidia Control Panel and just change it in-game.

Recommendation: High-Medium systems, turn OFF. For low-end systems, try ON / Ultra and see which one works best.

Max Frame Rate

There are many more efficient ways to cap your maximum frame rate, so there is no reason to use this one. In most modern games, you can cap your FPS in-game via the launcher, or commands.

Recommendation: Off

Preferred Refresh Rate

Recommendation: Highest available

Multi-Frame Sampled AA (MFAA)

Recommendation: Off

OpenGL rendering GPU

Recommendation: Choose your NVIDIA GPU

Power management mode

Recommendation: Prefer maximum performance

Shader Cache Size

Recommendation: Driver Default

Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization

Recommendation: ON

Texture filtering – Negative LOD bias

Recommendation: Allow

Texture filtering – Quality

Recommendation: High performance

Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization

Recommendation: On

Threaded optimization

Recommendation: On

Triple buffering

Recommendation: Off

Vertical sync

Recommendation: Off

Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames

Recommendation: 1

Configure Surround, PsyX Settings

Once you’ve applied all these settings, click “Apply” and let’s move on to the “Configure Surround, PsyX” setting tab.

All you want to do here is to choose your NVidia GPU under the PsyX settings ( Processor ).

Best NVidia Control Panel Display Settings

We are done with the 3D Settings of the NVidia control panel, now, let’s move on to the Display settings and configure anything needed.

Change Resolution

Navigate to the “Resolution” settings tab, and choose your monitor’s resolution and on Refresh rate, make sure to choose the highest available.

Scroll a little bit and you should see the settings below. By default the selected option will be “Use default color settings“, we want to change that to “Use NVIDIA color settings” and copy the settings from the image below.

Desktop Color Settings

On the Desktop Color Settings tab on the NVidia Control Panel, you can go ahead and experiment by yourself with the colors.

I personally prefer to leave everything default and just tweak my monitor color settings. Even if you mess up everything, you can always reset the settings to default, so there is nothing to worry about.

One setting that I would definitely experiment though is the “Digital vibrance“. You can turn it up from the default of 50% to something around 60% and adjust from there.

Rotate Display

The Rotate Display tab can come in handy if you have a monitor that can rotate 180 or 360 degrees. If you don’t, then you can skip this tab.

Digital Audio

You can adjust your monitor’s speakers; if your monitor doesn’t have inbuilt speakers, the features will be grayed out.

Adjust Desktop size and position

Under “Select a scaling mode:” , choose No scaling and then hit apply and you are good to go.

If you want a lower resolution to get stretched on full screen, then instead of No scaling, choose Full-screen.

For most users, the best option is No scaling.

Set up G-Sync

If your monitor supports G-Sync, this option will be available to you. You can turn it on and off and see what you like the most.

Set up multiple displays

If you have a multi-monitor setup, here is the place to configure them. On the other hand, if you don’t, just leave the default values.

Video

Adjust video color settings

You can experiment by yourself and adjust the colors, i prefer to leave this tab as it is.

Adjust video image settings

Same as the above one, I prefer the default options. You can go ahead and experiment by yourself.

Enhance your gaming experience

If you feel like your PC is underperforming, you can book a PC Optimization appointment with me, and I will be more than happy to help you out and solve all your problems and dramatically improve your pc performance.

NVidia Control Panel Settings: Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

Please note that these settings may not be appropriate for every person on this planet. We all do different things on our computers and have different preferences regarding quality and performance. To sum it up, these settings are intended for gamers who want the absolute best performance possible and don’t care much about the graphics quality.

So, those were the best NVidia control panel settings for the best performance possible. There isn’t much more room for optimizations except debloating your NVidia driver and a few tweaks, for which I will upload a post or video soon. If it happens, you have an AMD GPU-based computer.