It’s official: NVIDIA is retiring the classic Control Panel for GeForce users, 20 years after its introduction. Moving forward, the program will no longer receive new features, nor will it be part of the new Game Ready and Studio drivers for GeForce GPUs.
The (sort of) announcement of NVIDIA’s decision was made through the latest GeForce Game Ready driver updates, which is meant to support IO Interactive’s first James Bond title, 007: First Light, among other titles. “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.”
The Control Panel app won’t just disappear or be deleted with the next GeForce Game Ready Driver, but rather, it will simply remain there, living in something of a “maintenance mode”. That said, if one were to do a fresh installation on their system with the latest drivers, the program just will not be there. “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.”
To be clear, Control Panel will no longer be supported for GeForce GPUs, but it will be for RTX Pro GPUs.
Observers say that the move is a long time coming; the GPU brand has been slowly migrating all the features from the legacy app to its self-named App, since the latter launched in 2024. At this stage, there’s little reason for people who use GeForce cards to use Control Panel anymore. Surprisingly, its red rival, AMD, beat the green team to the punch with its current iteration of the Adrenaline Software App.
(Source: NVIDIA, Tom’s Hardware)
