AMD and Nvidia have always fought fiercely on the hardware front, and now the battleground is expanding to include software. Both companies recently released doit- all software clients that help you capture video, stream it, optimize your games, and lots more. And both are free. But the two packages take very different approaches, so we figured we’d pit them head-to-head to see which one is our favorite.
Nvidia’s software lets you adjust the optimization settings for speed or image quality, and is platform-agnostic.
AMD uses crowdsourcing for game optimization recommendations, but also plugs you into a social network of gamers.
ROUND 1 Game Library
The prime directive for both of these apps is to remove the mystery that surrounds game optimization, since most end users don’t know what settings to select for their hardware (MSAA, HBAO, PhysX, TressFX, etc.), and the games themselves are equally incapable of determining this. Both software packages make optimizing a game as easy as clicking a button in order to use pre-determined settings. Just like with SLI and Cross- Fire profiles, these settings have to be created and then uploaded to the client, and both packages support only a limited number of games so far. Having a large library of supported games is the goal though, so for this category it’s cut-and-dried—Nvidia so far supports 136 titles while AMD supports 69. Both companies deserve kudos for supporting titles that are bundled with its competitor’s GPUs.
Winner: GeForce Experience
ROUND 2 Social Features
Both software clients include features to help you share your gaming with friends and strangers, though Nvidia’s offering is much more limited than AMD’s. Nvidia allows for direct streaming to Twitch, and also lets you capture gameplay footage via ShadowPlay for uploading to YouTube, and both features work very well, but that’s about it for GeForce Experience. AMD’s Gaming Evolved, however, is an entire social network instead of just an app, as you can add friends from all the various gaming platforms, including Steam, Origin, Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. When you log into both the client and the website, you can see who is playing what, and easily broadcast to Twitch or watch other peoples’ streams. The app makes it easy to share your stream on Facebook and Twitter, too, and you can access all these features without ever leaving the game.
Winner: Gaming Evolved
ROUND 3 Streaming
Streaming your gaming footage is the cool thing to do these days, and though both apps let you broadcast to Twitch, the Nvidia app is head-and-shoulders better than AMD’s offering at this time, just because capturing or streaming your footage doesn’t affect your frames-per-second like it does on the AMD app. The Nvidia ShadowPlay app lets you send the stream to Twitch or to the hard drive, and we never noticed any performance impact, as it uses the built-in H.264 encoder in the GTX 600 and GTX 700 series cards. The Gaming Evolved app, on the other hand, killed our frame rate, and the fact that there’s no way to dictate the quality of the stream (which you can do with Nvidia) makes broadcasting very difficult due to a lack of control. We know AMD is working on improving this, but for now, Nvidia is the clear winner.
Winner: GeForce Experience
ROUND 4 Optimizing Accuracy
Both of these apps take a different approach to determining the “best” settings for your hardware. AMD uses crowdsourcing and analyzes connected players’ frame rate and PC configuration to see what works and what doesn’t work, while Nvidia relies on its own testers to figure out the best configurations. In our testing on a high-end Ultra PC, neither utility was perfect, but overall, the Nvidia software was more accurate, telling us to leave things where they were, or turn them down just a smidgen (everything was set to max). The AMD software, however, told us to turn everything down in all the games we tested (Far Cry 3, Crysis 3, etc.), which is not good advice. We also like the “My Rig” section of the Nvidia software that listed our config, as the AMD software made us wonder if it even knew what kind of machine we were using.
Winner: GeForce Experience
ROUND 5 Special Features
Though these apps are designed to optimize your games and to let you stream or save your footage, both also include several interesting features we consider to be bonus content. On the Nvidia side, the app will always keep your drivers up to date, and tells you when it last checked for an update. It will also let you stream a game to one of its Shield handheld devices. The Gaming Evolved app, on the other hand, does so many things it’s overwhelming. You can chat with people on different gaming platforms, earn “reward points” that can be redeemed for games and gear, and you can also add widgets to the desktop dock, making it a fun app to use while gaming if you want to quickly chat or open a web browser. As cranky old men, we prefer the slimmed-downed Nvidia software, but there’s no denying Gaming Evolved has more extra features.
Winner: Gaming Evolved
And the Winner Is…
Both of these apps add a lot of value and new functionality to the GPU currently residing in your PC, but in this battle we prefer Nvidia’s GeForce Experience because its core functionality works almost flawlessly. It gives better game-settings recommendations, streaming is smooth as silk, and we also love its capturing tools. AMD’s app is certainly full-featured, but feels too unpolished. Of course, the AMD app is still in beta, so hopefully future versions will iron out the bugs.
