GeForce Experience beta launches: Help Nvidia help you optimize your graphics settings

Back in April at the unveiling of the GeForce GTX 690 in Shanghai, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang also announced an ambitious project intended to make PC gaming as simple and streamlined as possible for gamers who feel overwhelmed by the vast number of graphics options available to them–as well as the difficulty in finding the right balance between picture and performance. The project is a cloud-based service called GeForce Experience, and it’s launching today in a beta limited to the first 10,000 gamers who register and download the executable (grab it here).

Pretty nice bump upwards in Crysis 2 for a single mouseclick.

The beta currently supports Nvidia’s Fermi and Kepler GPUs (including the mobile versions), and works with about 30 games. Essentially, the guys at Nvidia play through these games on a massive variety of systems, and fine-tune the settings to be as visually pleasing as possible while still maintaining about 40-60 frames per second in the most resource-intensive areas and sequences. The sheer amount of data involved is pretty massive, which is why they’re looking to the community to spot check their work.
When you’re ready to play, the GeForce Experience application matches your hardware configuration to the closest configuration tested and then automatically adjusts your game’s settings for you for the best picture at a decent framerate (see the comparisons between default and optimized graphics options settings below). You’re free to tweak the settings further if you feel like it: the GeForce Experience won’t butt back in and mess with them again.

Check out the difference in legibility of the watch displays in these screens from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

As a bonus, GeForce experience will automatically keep your drivers up to date via the cloud, and can be set to background download mode. But again, the beta is limited to the first 10,000 registrants, so grab it quick if you want in before the official launch next year.