Nvidia is no stranger to trying to make your video games look good, but this is a different take. Nvidia's doing software now, and its GeForce Experience wants to optimize your graphics settings.
GeForce Experience's flagship feature is the ability to optimize visual settings for PC games with one click. If you're not into guess-and-check futzing with anti-aliasing levels and shadow options, GeForce Experience can fetch optimal settings from the cloud and apply them for you, writing changes directly to your game's config file.
In order to figure out what "optimized" is, games are tested by live, human players who peg appropriate benchmarks and FPS goals for optimal play. Basically, that's a part of the game that's a good representation of how it runs on your hardware. From there, those goals are fed into an algorithm that tests thousands of setting combinations over thousands of hardware configurations at a huge "render farm" in Moscow to figure out the best settings you can eek out of a system while still getting suitable performance.
And even if you don't need a computer to tell you what resolution to use, GeForce Experience still has something for you; it'll handle your driver updates. Whether you just want to keep up to date on your drivers or opt into the betas, the software will automatically let you know when a new one's out and seamlessly download it in the background. And when it comes to drivers, things can't be too easy.
While GeForce Experience is obviously going to be tailored to Nvidia's hardware, this free software isn't locked to it, though it might be questionably useful otherwise. And although you probably know how to/like to tinker with your settings, one-click optimization could be damn handy for suckers who are getting screwed by bad out-of-the-box settings. The service is going into a closed beta today, so get in line if it sounds up your alley. If you frequent the settings panel, it's probably not going to change your life, but you can't argue with automatic driver updates. [Nvidia]