Nvidia Profile Inspector – Deeper Dive Into Nvidia GPU Settings
You installed a brand new custom Windows, you installed a custom power plan, tweaked some latency, and fixed your Nvidia panel settings – with all this you would think you are ready to do some gaming.
Technically you would be correct, but in reality, there is another useful step you can take to make sure that your Nvidia GPU is working to its max potential – you can tweak your GPU settings using the Nvidia Profile Inspector.
What Is the Nvidia Profile Inspector Tool?
The Nvidia Profile Inspector is a useful tool that unlocks a lot of the hidden settings that the Nvidia Control Panel keeps hidden from the users. The main reason this is done is because a lot of these settings, if configured without understanding what they do, might actually impact your performance negatively or just cause crashes and freezes in games.
Generally, I would suggest that fixing your Nvidia Control Panel settings is enough, but if you want to make sure there is no setting left unturned then the Profile Inspector tool is what you need to get familiar with.
To get everything done right first you need to tweak your Nvidia Control panel settings then you finish the tweaks using the profile inspector for more in-depth and granular changes. If you want maximum performance you can just copy and paste the settings I will show, otherwise you will need to inform yourself about each setting so you can strike a balance between visuals and performance.
Sync and Refresh
After you have opened the tool and made sure you are editing the global driver profile, the very first thing you need to do is tweak your Adaptive-Sync settings. This category is easy because if you want to use G-Sync/Free-Sync at some point you just leave the settings be.
If you know you will never use that feature then make sure to turn everything related to G-Sync off.
Make sure your Maximum pre-rendered frames are set to 1, Preferred Refresh Rate to Highest available, and then off/force off for V-Sync and Triple buffering.
Anti-Aliasing
Anti-aliasing reduces FPS in most cases and since we want to get the max possible performance this entire category of settings just needs to be turned off.
Make sure you have Nvidia Predefined FXAA Usage set to Disallowed and everything else on Off.
Texture Filtering
Any form of texture filtering means less performance so we want to make sure these settings are all off. To achieve that make sure that Prevent Anisotropic filtering, Anisotropic filter optimization, and sample optimization are all On.
This will make sure that the GPU ignores texture filtering altogether. Also, make sure your Texture filtering quality is set to High performance and Trilinear optimization is On.
Common
In this category, you want to ensure that Ambient Occlusion settings are Off along with your P2 state. This will force your GPU into a P0 state and will make it stay at the highest frequency it can achieve for longer resulting in better performance. At the same time, if your GPU is struggling with temperatures then turning this setting Off will help it cool down significantly since it won’t be forced to boost all the time. If you have adequate cooling, having this on will only result in benefits.
Make sure you also set the Power management mode to Prefer maximum performance, Shader cache on if you have an SSD (off if you use an HDD) and Threaded optimization is On.
SLI & Stereo
Ignore these 2 categories unless you run an older rig with GPUs in SLI.
Other
This is the last category that you want to touch up. The main 2 settings are Maximum frames allowed that should be changed to 1 and Memory Allocation Policy to Moderate Pre-Allocation.
If you have disabled G-Sync in the previous Sync and Refresh category also disable Variable Refresh Rate at the bottom of the Other category.
Take note that I am using a stripped-down Nvidia driver with no GeForce Experience or any other features meaning that some of the settings in my Profile Inspector are already off without me touching them. I am mentioning this because in the Other section there are settings that will brick your other features if turned off.
If you want to use the settings I have showcased in the Other category only change the 2 settings I have pointed out!
With this, you are done and can click Apply since you have fully customized and tuned your Nvidia settings to get the maximum FPS and lowest latency.
Please, change information about “CUDA – Force P2 State”, since Off actually changes your Performance State (P-State) to 0 (which by the way, is the highest, and not the P-State 2) This is from the actual nVidia Docs: https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/gameworkslibrary/coresdk/nvapi/group__gpupstate.html TL;DR The GPU performance state APIs are used to get and set various performance levels on a per-GPU basis. P-States are GPU active/executing performance capability and power consumption states. P-States range from P0 to P15, with P0 being the highest performance/power state, and P15 being the lowest performance/power state. Each P-State maps to a performance level. Not all P-States are available… Read more »
Thank you for pointing this out. You are right. Fixed.
This program is useless because it has a limited built in list that cannot have anything added to it The last version of this was released in November 26 2022. Right now there are a bunch of trolls running around the net claiming to use this on games like Dead Space remake which is from 2023 which is a load of crap. Not only is that game NOT on the programs built in game listing, but there is no possible way to add to the programs game listing because the program doesn’t have a browse and add game option in… Read more »
Hi. Try to use it as a global profile.