Disabling NVIDIA Streamer Service Gives Video Card Performance Boost?

By Nathan Kirsch

If you are a Reddit user and like to read the PC Master Race subreddit you might have noticed there is a thread going on about how to get a performance boost on your NVIDIA GeForce video card. The thread basically goes into detail about how to disable the NVIDIA Streaming Service that is used by NVIDIA SHIELD owners to stream their game titles. It appears that this service is setup to run automatically by default and is said to lower your frame-rate by 3-5% when gaming. If you don’t have an NVIDIA SHIELD this service doesn’t need to be running all the time and you can disable it manually by the method described below by the Reddit user lhikary.

Recently i found that my card was trying to stream games to a nvidia shield even though i dont own one and it was eating at my cpu and destroying my framerate in games however i found a way to close down this process. click the windows icon in the bottom left and search “services” Next open up services and locate “NVIDIA Streamer Service” Open the service and stop the service if its running then disable the service. Do all this and hit apply and you’ll be able to see a noticable framerate boost and drop in your cpu usage!

Legit Reviews contacted NVIDIA and found out that they are aware of this issue and how it is “affecting a small subset of systems” that use GeForce video cards. They also plan to have a fix for this issue in an update for GeForce Experience that will be coming out in early May. Maybe we’ll see the option to enable/disable NVIDIA streaming services in the days ahead so no manual editing is required!

If you manually install your driver and do a custom install you might have already have this service disabled! AMD Radeon users might be laughing right now, but keep in mind AMD users can disable the AMD External Events Utility and AMD FUEL Service for a small performance bump as well. If you want the most performance that is possible there is usually always something you can disable to give you an extra percent or two!