5 ways to fix "Nvidia display settings are not available" error on Windows

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The graphics card is one of the most important components for any gaming PC, and that's exactly why running into GPU-related issues is so frustrating. Fortunately, if you have a video card from Nvidia, using the Nvidia Control Panel makes dealing with these issues a bit easier. It offers several useful options and features that are still missing on other Nvidia companion apps, making it a must-have utility on your PC.

With that said, it's not very intuitive, and you might run into errors such as "Nvidia display settings are not available." There could be a few reasons why you may see this particular error on your Windows PC, so it's hard to tell what exactly is causing it. Thankfully, there are a few different things you can try to get rid of this error, and they're all fairly simple and straightforward.

Having trouble opening Nvidia Control Panel on Windows? Here are the steps you need to take to fix it.

The first thing you need to do is to ensure that your display is plugged properly into your Nvidia graphics card. This is crucial because the Nvidia Control Panel won't recognize your display if it's not properly plugged in, resulting in various errors, including the one we're trying to solve here.

Your PC, in case you're wondering, has several display ports, and you must ensure you've connected your monitor's display cable to the Nvidia graphics card's (discrete) port. The GPU will usually have a mix of HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, so make sure you're plugged into one of these securely. Restart your PC after you've established the right connection to see if it fixed the error. Alternatively, you can also try to use a different port on your graphics card to see if that fixes the error. Doing this will ensure that you're not using a bad port that's causing this issue to begin with.

There are several Nvidia services running on your Windows PC at any given point that manage the display driver. They include:

These services ensure your graphics card and the Windows OS have no communication issues, so it's crucial to have these services running properly. Your Nvidia graphics driver and the Nvidia Control Panel may have some trouble working properly if one or more of these services aren't working. To ensure the aforementioned services are working properly:

A quick way to resolve pesky software errors is by disabling or restarting the associated hardware itself. In this case, you can try to disable and re-enable the Nvidia graphics card that's installed on your PC to see if it fixes the issue.

We only recommend doing this if your CPU has integrated graphics. If you disable the graphics card in the Device Manager, you will get a black screen immediately, and a restart might not fix it if you don't have integrated graphics. There are still ways to enable your GPU after all this, and we'll go over them in the steps below.

A simple graphics driver update is all it takes to fix a lot of GPU-related issues. This is particularly true if you haven't updated the graphics driver of your PC, so consider this as a sign to breathe a new life into your Nvidia graphics card. To update the graphics card driver manually:

If just updating doesn't work, you might need to perform a completely fresh install for the Nvidia drivers. This process is very similar to just updating the drivers, with the major difference being that you need to uninstall to remove the pre-existing drivers first.

The "Nvidia display settings are not available" error could also be a result of just a bad graphics driver, and there's a good chance that a new driver that you may have downloaded and installed on your Windows may have triggered it. If the error popped up after updating a graphics driver, then you might want to roll things back to see if it fixes the error. Here's how to roll back Nvidia drivers with Device Manager.

Nvidia's Control Panel may have some important options and tools to help your GPU perform better, but it's no secret that it's a crusty old app that's losing its charm among all the other modern programs that we have. The company's new Nvidia App is expected to merge the GeForce Experience and all the Control Panel options to serve as a one-stop solution, but it's not ready for prime time just yet.

Let's hope the Nvidia App will deliver us a much better experience overall someday, and we won't have to deal with many of these annoying Control Panel issues. For now, though, you can try one of the aforementioned troubleshooting methods to see if it fixes the "Nvidia display settings are not available" error on Windows.

The Nvidia app beta adds cool new features, but it's still quite barebones.

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