At least for now, the Control Panel will continue to be installed for users of RTX Pro, RTX, and Quadro GPUs using Nvidia’s workstation drivers, since Nvidia hasn’t migrated all of the relevant professional features from the Control Panel to the Nvidia app.
As best as I can tell from Reddit and Internet Archive sleuthing, the Nvidia Control Panel as it currently exists was introduced in February of 2006 in the ForceWare 83.60 driver package. The old 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 way back 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 could want to change, but you’re never more than a couple of clicks away from a Windows NT-style dialog box that looks almost the same now as it did 25 years ago.
The Guru3D forum thread about the then-new ForceWare release shows there are some constants in computing and software development. Multiple users complain about feature regressions or about not being able to open the new Control Panel at all. One remarks on the size of the download (a whopping 45MB).
“New cpanel works for me but I dont like the new panel,” writes one poster. “Old one pwns it.”
