I installed the NVIDIA app and did as you suggested, turning off all unnecessary features, like automatically setting optimal variables for my video card.
I will say the first thing it did was uninstall GFORCE Experience, which was getting extremely buggy as of late. (It would require you to sign in before allowing you to download the latest driver. Why? - And then the login window would not appear to work anyway unless I logged in as Administrator )
The NVIDIA Control Panel is still installed, but most of the setting you can change there you can change in the NVIDIA app as well.
ANyway, it works. It's not buggy. I am ok with it.