Nvidia kills Windows XP-era Control Panel “after 20 years of dedicated service”

At least for now, the Control Panel will continue to be installed for users of RTX Pro, RTX, and Quadro GPUs using Nvidia drivers, as Nvidia has not migrated all the necessary information from the Control Panel to the Nvidia software.

How can I find out Reddit and Internet Archive sleuthingThe Nvidia Control Panel as it currently exists was introduced in February 2006 in the ForceWare 83.60 driver package. The the old GeForce 7 series was Nvidia’s latest and greatest at the time, but the Control Panel it would have been there on older cards like the GeForce 2 MX, which was released back in 2000.

The look and feel of the Control panel have changed a little since then, mirroring Windows itself: There is a new, modern, shiny program that contains almost everything you want to change, but you are never more than a few clicks away from the Windows NT-style dialogue box that looks almost the same now as it did 25 years ago.

The Guru3D forum thread about the latest release of ForceWare itself shows that there are some changes in computing and programming. A number of users complain about the appearance change or the inability to open the new Control Panel. One comment on the size of the download (maximum 45MB).

“The new cpanel works for me but I don’t like the new panel,” he captioned one photo. “The old man loves him.”