NVIDIA App

NVIDIA App.exe is the NVIDIA App, NVIDIA's unified companion software that officially replaced GeForce Experience. It merges the old GeForce Experience, RTX features, and parts of the NVIDIA Control Panel for driver updates, game settings, and capture. It is not the GPU driver: the driver installs and runs on its own, and your graphics card works without this app.

What running it does: it installs background services hosted by nvcontainer.exe (curated separately) that auto-start with Windows, and it provides the ShadowPlay and Share capture and overlay through NVIDIA Overlay.exe (the Alt+Z overlay), which replaced the GeForce Experience-era NVIDIA Share.exe. The overlay hooks games to draw its panels and capture footage.

The transition from GeForce Experience to the NVIDIA App is the current reality, so on an up-to-date machine the overlay process is NVIDIA Overlay.exe rather than the older NVIDIA Share.exe. As a first-party GPU-vendor overlay it is generally tolerated by anti-cheats.

If you have an NVIDIA GPU and installed the companion app, this process is expected. It is optional: the driver alone is enough to run games, and the app can be skipped if you do not want the overlay and capture features.