NVIDIA GeForce Experience 1.8 Adds Adjustable Optimal Settings & ShadowPlay Improvements

It seems that an update to SHIELD wasn’t enough to satiate NVIDIA’s appetite this week, as it’s gone ahead and released a significant update to its GeForce Experience application, as well. As the title of this post spoils (gee, thanks, title!), this update features adjustable optimizations and ShadowPlay improvements.

The heart of GeForce Experience – and the reason it first came into existence – is its ability to optimize a wide-variety of games, made possible by the efforts of NVIDIA’s in-house benchmarkers. Because there’s no such thing as “one-size-fits-all”, though, NVIDIA has added a slider that allows a user to weigh performance above image quality, and vice versa. An example can be seen below:

Here’s a scenario where this slider might prove useful: If GeForce Experience chooses a non-native monitor resolution in order to increase image quality, you might actually prefer the opposite – a native resolution, but weaker image quality. With this slider (and related drop-down), that tweak is easy to pull off.

Another scenario is if you overclock your CPU – an instance where you might know that your gaming performance would be improved. In that case, if you have notches on this slider beyond the “Optimal” marker, you can test them out and see how you fare.

With ShadowPlay’s update, NVIDIA takes care of some common requests. First, Windows 7 users can now “shadow” up to 20 minutes of gameplay, mirroring the capability on Windows 8, and no more is the 3.8GB single-file limitation.

Those features are nice, but it’s the next one that a lot of people will swoon over:

That’s right – the ability to record both a microphone and in-game audio at the same time.

In a future update (possibly 1.9?), NVIDIA will be adding the ability to stream directly to Twitch.TV. I saw this feature in action a couple of months ago, and it was so impressive, it seems likely that NVIDIA will instantly win over anyone who takes online game-streaming seriously once it becomes available.

At this point, isn’t it about time to also add multi-monitor support to GeForce Experience, NVIDIA?