Nvidia's new companion software is not ready to fully replace the Control Panel and GeForce Experience yet, but it's definitely a good start to what could potentially be a one-stop solution to all your graphics needs in the future. There are plenty of ways Nvidia can improve the software experience for its users, but there's one feature in particular that I would like to see it borrowing from AMD's software — GPU tuning.

That's right, the ability to tune your graphics card is something that's entirely missing on the new Nvidia app. In fact, it's not a thing you'll find on the GeForce Experience. This honestly seems like a glaring omission to me, especially when a lot of modern GPUs have plenty of headroom for performance improvement.

Nvidia's automatic overclocking is very limited

It lacks a lot of crucial features

Nvidia's GeForce Experience has a built-in "performance tuning" feature, which automatically applies a small overclock to the graphics card. You can access this particular tuning feature via the GeForce Experience's in-game overlay. Here's how:

1. Press Alt + Z to open the Nvidia GeForce Experience overlay.
2. Select the Performance option.
3. Click the Enable automatic tuning toggle to apply a small overclock.

Doing so will prompt the GeForce Experience to start the overclocking process. This feature, while it makes it easy to overclock the GPU, is very conservative with its overclock, and it doesn't do much to change a lot of values. It doesn't let you tweak any of the values manually either, which is a bit of a letdown for those who like to have some control over the settings that are changed.

Also, your mileage may vary, but I've had mixed experience using this feature to overclock my GPUs, with some of them running into performance and stability issues in certain games or apps. The same GPUs, however, work just fine when I manually work my way through the numbers while overclocking them.

AMD's GPU tuning is significantly better

A true alternative to utilities like MSI Afterburner

AMD's GPU performance tuning features, which can easily be accessed via the Radeon software, are significantly better in comparison. I say that because the AMD Adrenaline software also offers manual overclocking options in addition to handy automatic tuning features. The manual tuning options are quite good as you get to tweak a lot of settings including the frequency (MHz) and Voltage (mV). Notably, you also get the option to tune the VRAM, so things like memory timing and frequency are also within reach.

This makes for a great overclocking experience, and is perfectly usable for even those who are used to working with more advanced utilities like the MSI Afterburner for GPU clocking. In fact, I'd even go as far as to say that AMD's GPU tuning interface is a lot cleaner and easier to navigate and use, compared to the Afterburner software.

Nvidia App is still quite barebones

I've already talked about how the new Nvidia App is still missing a lot of crucial features, and it still feels very barebones. It's still in beta, though, which means Nvidia is still fine-tuning and adding more features to it before the official rollout to all users. GPU performance tuning options are high up on my list of features that I want Nvidia to add to its new application, and I hope we get some better than the one-click automatic overclocking feature that we currently have on the GeForce Experience utility.