At least for now, the Control Panel will continue to be installed for users of RTX Pro, RTX and Quadro GPUs that use Nvidia’s Workstation drivers, as Nvidia has not moved all relevant professional features from the Control Panel to the Nvidia app.
As far as I can tell from the sleuths of Reddit and the Internet Archive, the Nvidia Control Panel as it currently exists was introduced in the Forceware 83.60 driver package in February 2006. The older GeForce 7 series was Nvidia’s latest and greatest at the time, but the control panel would have been available on cards as old as the GeForce 2 MX, which was released in 2000.
The look and feel of the Control Panel has changed little since then, mirroring Windows itself: There’s a new, modern, shiny app that handles almost every setting you want to change, but you’re never more than a few clicks away from a Windows NT-style dialog box that looks almost the same now as it did 25 years ago.
A Guru3D forum thread about then-new Forceware releases shows that there are some constants in computing and software development. Many users complain about the lack of a feature or not being able to open the new Control Panel. One commented on the size of the download (about 45MB).
“The new cPanel works for me but I don’t like the new panel,” one poster wrote. “The old man chews it.”
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