Nvidia got PC gamers a questionable holiday gift this year: worse performance in their games. That's according to testing done by Tom's Hardware, who found that playing PC games while running the recently launched Nvidia desktop app can reduce in-game frame rates by as much as 15 percent in some cases.

Nvidia recently updated some of its clutter of PC apps, including the GPU-controlling GeForce Experience, to a single Nvidia App. And while that makes for fewer icons in your system tray, it seems the new program’s AI features are potentially harming your gaming framerates.

Nvidia is aware of the Nvidia App issues and is working on fixes, but for now it recommends a simple workaround.

Nvidia has shared a temporary fix for a known issue impacting systems running its recently unveiled NVIDIA App and causing gaming performance to drop by up to 15%.

Nvidia's shift from GeForce Experience to the Nvidia App came with some unexpected frame rate drops. Here's how to fix them.

The site's testing with and without the Nvidia App installed confirms that, across five games running on an RTX 4060, the app reduced average frame rates by around 3 to 6 percent, depending on the resolution and graphical quality level.

When the Nvidia App launched last month, it looked like a universal improvement over GeForce Experience. (Finally, no more login required for driver updates and game optimizations!) Unfortunately, it now appears that this new software has its own problems,

The Nvidia App's lower framerates are caused by its Nvidia Overlay feature. Disabling the Nvidia Overlay in settings can restore any lost performance after installing the Nvidia App. Uninstalling the Nvidia App also removes Overlay,