nVidia drivers soon only available through GeForce Experience

We need to collect geForce Experience version now so we could have the one without forced Auto-Update and which still will download driver updates without signing-in.

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That's the thing, you can't use an old version. If you don't connect to the internet, it won't work. If you don't upgrade when the net detects a new version, it won't let you do anything @.@.

 

So those who have used GFE to update drivers, it saves the installation files somewhere on the system, right? Because people who need to modify INF to install drivers need access to those installation files, otherwise they're SOL.

 

Oh boy...I knew W10 would open the flood doors for all these knuckle-head companies to more abuse end-user choice/privacy. The majority's apparent willingness to adopt W10's nonsense just gives all these companies the cojones to do things like this. For some reason, this whole "taking the P out of PC" is like watching footage of the Hindenburg crash. You know there's disaster brewing but you're just wondering when. Let's all stay far, far away and keep searching out alternatives. Ridiculous. Ugh.

 

Good timing Nvidia, I recently decided having 4 more years of windows 7 support was enough for me to pull the trigger on a new laptop with a 980m (since I have no desire to play in windows 10 user unfriendly mess), but since you're going to play the same M$ game (I never had a doubt you would as it's just the Apple and Google playcard) with poor user base decisions, I'm not buying! You saved me thousands of $ and I thank you. Hearing about this a month from now after I bought a 980m would have been infuriating. I guess I don't need a new lappy for JC3.

 

Ha, even AMD taking shots at Nvidia: https://mobile.twitter.com/AMDRadeon/status/655028000438800384

Roy, is that you?

 

There will undoubtedly be a way around this...

With that said, while I don't support what nVidia is doing forcing us to use GFE, the games I've used it on have achieved the performance and graphical quality balance I've been looking for and it is actually customizable for presets for people that have a preference that leans either towards speed or image quality.

It is unfortunate that nVidia is choosing to go this route but we have been able to extract embedded installers since the dawn of InstallShield so while it will be a pain, we will find a way around it.

 

From the bottom of my heart screw you Nvidia. My laptop (the one in the sig) died just a couple weeks ago, and reading this kind of crap almost makes me glad it did. I hate Geforce experience. Since I don't use Shadowplay or Gamestream or any of their other bloody nonsense, Geforce experience is just one of the biggest nuisances that I dealt with on my laptop, so much so that I uninstalled it completely. It just sat around as a memory and power hog, draining my battery since it always had the 760M running.

Add onto that the security issue. You know they're going to be vacuuming up your personal data with this software. I've already got Google and Microsoft trying to sleep in my own bed with me, and I sure as hell don't want Nvidia fighting for a place under the covers as well.

This is it for me. The last straw. I'm not doing any gaming anymore aside from the titles I already have* until this industry shows some reform.

In other words, until AMD gets its crap together. We know this wouldn't be happening at all if they had AMD breathing down their necks. Hell, even if it was a 30/70% split, at least Nvidia would think before pulling stuff like this.

/rant

* Trails in the Sky SC might have me break that rule.

 

So, if we want, we can just get quarterly updates from their site and install without GFE just as we do now. Is that correct?

I'll be honest, I don't get the attraction or benefit to these specific game ready drivers. Why would I want a driver designed for 1 specific game that seems to at times ruin the experience for multiple other games. Seems to me, just having the newest driver should be enough to get a great gaming experience for all games minus having presets.

I have said it before but I really think this pattern of optimizing drivers for 1 game is a big part of why their drivers suck these days. I think they need to worry about creating good drivers for each family of cards instead of worrying about specific games. When you suck, you go back to the basics until you start to get it right. Right now Nvidia sucks, time to go back to basics and make drivers that allow cards to function properly instead of spending months prepping and optimizing for a minimum increase in game performance.

 

So you're OK with potentially waiting 3 months for SLI profiles and fixes for newly released games that you want to play, among other things?

 

you misinterpreted my tone, I wasn't saying it in a challenging way. I just don't understand why we have to get a game specific driver for one game when during the same time there are probably 50 other games released that don't get a specific driver. I guess I would rather Nvidia release good drivers that actually work and not offer to release game specific drivers. Instead, make the damn game companies do their job and release sli compatibility and proper optimization when they release their game instead of knowing they can count on Nvidia covering their ass when they finally decide to do it.

I might feel different if Nvidia could do anything right, but their drivers have sucked for atleast a year. Beyond that, I feel like Nvidia devotes too much time to one game at the expense of quality drivers in general. And I feel the game companies get to release crap knowing that they can ask Nvidia to release a fix later on. People get all up in arms about MS releasing Win 10 that's broken, why not the same reaction to Nvidia's drivers and game companies broken and/or crippled games.

 

You answered your own question

 

SLI profiles can be exported and imported to old versions and nVidia has been releasing such poor drivers lately anyway that most of us don't even upgrade... 347.88 is still my favorite and most stable driver and that came out in March and its almost November. I don't like what nVidia is doing but I remember putting up with Catalyst with my 5830 and how the control panel crashed probably one out of four times - not just a crash but a crash that required rebooting the system because it made everything unstable. I also remember the days when I had to use one driver for one game and another for another game, especially with my ATI 9800 XT and X800 GTO. Both companies are known for poor drivers, they've traded blows for the worst driver award for as long as I can remember.

 

Yeah, I'm on a fairly old driver too. I'm on 355.84, and the installer I have for it works on both desktops and laptops which is really convenient, and it's perfectly stable. After watching Linuses video about GPU drivers ( ) I don't have much of a desire at all to upgrade my GPU driver, for at least a very long time.

 

I'm on 344.48 and still believe that 337.81 would be a better choice. Yet I'm on Fermi card though.

 

I think it's hilarious that Linus was using 337.88... That was my go to and still would be if it wasn't for Witcher 3.

I would be curious to see an AMD video because AMD is known for as high as 30% performance increases 1-2 years after the cards came out... But this isn't necessarily a good thing... Everyone know that nVidia messed up bad with the 19x series of drivers but when you look at the others tested the gains and losses were minimal... AMD on the other hand would be more likely to have a steady staircase. That's great for owners that don't want the best right away but considering AMD just posted another loss (I'm not separating GPU and CPU numbers because AMD is AMD. It would be the same situation if we were looking at the money nVidia has lost across its various product lines), they need to increase the immediate attractiveness of their product which is power versus the competition when it comes out, not a year down the line.

 

This is a bit of a niggle but, I don't think that it will bother me.

I already have Geforce experience installed and use it to search and update if necessary. However, I have 5 Nvidia processes in services.msc set to "manual" instead of "run". Geforce Experience is one of these processes which no longer auto runs in Windows startup. When I want to search/install updates then, I just open Geforce Experience manually and install them. - I don't have Windows 10 yet but please mention if you are no longer able to do this after updating from Windows 8.1. - The Windows 7, XP equivalent to disable Geforce bloatware at startup is through msconfig>startup.

The niggle for me is that it looks like I will have to create an account for when I search for drivers via Geforce experience. I can just make a dummy e-mail address when I make an account for them so that I can get a log on.

What I'm saying is that it is a niggle. But, people can install Geforce experience then disable it at startup. Make a dummy account with Nvidia and manually check with for updates as they please.

 

@Matrix Leader - thanks for the all the help in setting up the new PC and installing this latest driver rev

 

Next time Nvidia change things; It's only possible to download or update newest drivers and the whole package from win update. You can't do anything to prevent crippled drivers and you haven't any choice. This is the new future. This is not a horror story.

 

I think the point most of us are making is that you shouldn't have the choice taken away from you and be forced to tolerate these niggles to use your product.

Although I'm not a huge fan of the slippery slope argument, I do believe that psychological conditioning is real. I mean hell when the 980 Ti came out at $649 we drooled all over the "amazing deal", while if this was 2011 people would've been furious. But those $1000 Titans set the bar really high, so in comparison the 980 Ti seemed to be a good deal. What I'm getting at here is I wouldn't be surprised if eventually the only way to update drivers was via GFE, with direct downloads being no longer possible. Or worse, the driver simply stops working if it doesn't detect GFE, although this is a bit too much in the tinfoil hat territory for me.

 

I agree, except for the tin foil hat part. It's a very real possibility me thinks.

I'll never buy a HP product again. When I moved from W7 to W8.1 they wouldn't let me download official 8.1 printer drivers without submitting a phone number for verification. Not only that they lace their setup package with Bing bar installations.

Everyone wants to data mine with the software after you've already committed to the hardware. This needs to end.

 

Hello I just read the article. I have an Alienware 17 R1 (2013) that I was going to upgrade the graphics card to a 980m. I know that from when I Installed the new card I'm getting, I will have to use modded drivers. Should I still get the graphics card or not? do you think eurocom will still be able to get modded drivers? what do you guys think I should do.

 

Honestly? If you could sell the AW17 R1 for a good bit of cash, I would suggest a P770DM from Eurocom instead. The CPU will run better and overclock better and the GPU will have full support.

Or you could wait a while and the P775DM will be a similarly-sized/designed machine with a mobile 980 in it.

 

Agreed... Don't waste money on these old Alienwares... All you get is heartache with these new Maxwell GPU's and the Alienwares... The P770/775 work perfectly unlike Alienwares with the 970M/980M and 980..

 

We need a savior a.k.a Mr. Robot to fix things up, these corporate conglomerates are ruining the 21st century. The whole future sounds to me like - Remember Me & Deus EX

I'm waiting for AMD to kick nVidrosoft's arse

 

I've thought about this... And if they can actually make a decent driver again, I'm okay with GFE shoved down my throat. But I'm a rare breed who actually likes GFE... It finally made Watch Dogs playable.

 

I use GFE too. But I don't upgrade drivers through it. Although it makes little difference for me, I don't like where this is going and don't appreciate a company trying to put me up against the wall like that.

What they are doing is wrong in principle and down right offensive. Take my money, then take my right to enjoy that hardware in it's full capacity unless I bend over and permanently keep their spying bloatware.

Nah nah nah.. Nvidia can go stick it where the sun don't shine. I don't need them, they need me. I hope you guys realize that too, not just Nvidia, any company that thinks anal probing their customers an acceptable practice.

 

This is the real issue. They know we need them for best performance in today's games, or best overclockability. Same with BGAtel. And even if we didn't grab them, NONE of us are nearly influential enough to make enough of the masses or OEMs remove their crap. It is what it is. Even if we don't buy it, and this whole forum doesn't buy it, and nobody on /r/pcmasterrace and /r/pcgaming doesn't buy it... that's what, 5% of their sales? It doesn't affect them significantly.

 

I wouldn't have a clue how much percentage we'd all make up. Knowing that would actually be very useful. It only ever takes a minority to wake up the masses, but I fear you're right. Not enough people care enough to make a difference. At least not yet.

 

The problem is that they'll never care enough.

It's like this old poem about not speaking up:

"First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

By the time everybody gets visibly screwed at once, there'll be nothing speaking out can do.
Mobile users will be in the gutter, and honestly already are.
Desktop users will need to be logged by account to get drivers, and it means modding broken drivers .inf files will no longer work.
The 970 proved that they could literally sell dog feces in GPU form and people will buy it and DEFEND it because it works 95% of the time for most people.

What is gonna happen by the time they do something like... charge people a monthly fee to unlock overclocking in drivers or some crap? By the time it happens, everybody will have been so accepting of everything before it that there'll be nothing they can do. They already gave their money. They already gave their consent. They already deal with the lack of care. When the masses decide enough is enough after the screwing goes so far that what was once basic functionality is now behind a paywall or selling your own personal data or something similar, there'll be no reason for them to say no. Nobody will be on AMD. There'll be no competition. There'll be nowhere for people to jump ship to. It'll be too late, and I will look at every single one of them and say "you asked for this. When I and others said it two years ago, you said it was fine. You're not allowed to suddenly decide it's not fine and expect things to change on a dime".

I even managed to shut up Sora on their forums after the last set of drivers. ManuelG said they didn't support mixed WDDM and they'd support it later this year, and Sora asked why the previous driver supported it then. I told him they don't even know their drivers. Sora said they aren't AMD, and I said that the throttling at stock of 780M SLI in alienwares after 345.20 that they "can't figure out" and all the TDRs from 350.12 until ~355.60 that they "couldn't figure out" or reproduce wouldn't have happened if they knew their drivers, and that if they really do know them, they spent the last 7 months showing that very badly. No replies yet.

 

Yeah, if you're gonna put me up against a wall, buy me dinner first... seriously.

I mean, I guess the good thing in all of this is that newer, buggier drivers can't be forced down our throat automatically anymore.

 

Then they make updates compulsory. If a update is detected but you don't give it time to load it, it will just display a progress bar and any request to initialized a DX context will be redirected to the update notice. It's for your own good.

 

As long as AMD doesn't have a competitive product, nVidia will keep doing what they're doing. I agree that nVidia is out of line, I'm just trying to be positive because I know I don't want to downgrade to an AMD card......

 

Yep.. i think we're pretty much all on the same page here. We competition on all sides to keep all these bastards honest.

 

we just need someone to extract the driver files and post them

 

There is no such thing as a publicly traded company when it comes to honesty vs making money... Sad but unfortunately true. ATI / AMD did the same thing when they were the top dogs... If AMD didn't sit on their high chair when they crushed Intel with the Athlon 64 thinking they didn't have to do anything to stay on top, we wouldn't be facing the ngreedia and sintel monopolies...

 

It was made by the priest Martin Niemoller: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

It's so true.. We really need to speak up before we are wiped out!

 

We all spoke up and ended up with soldered CPUs... You really think they care about anything more than making a buck? I mean Intel is a perfect example... They switched from solder to crap goop for Haswell... We all know how that turned out... Then they changed it up for the 4790K, called it Devil's Canyon and made bank... As someone who owned both a 4770K that wouldn't pass 4.3GHz stable and now has a 4790K that he got from @n=1 that can POST at 4.9GHz, is usable at 4.8GHz, and doesn't make the fans get loud even after a wPrime run on his Corsair H100i @ 4.7GHz which he runs 24/7 I can honestly tell you... They don't care as long as they're keeping investors happy. Sad but unfortunate reality is that if AMD doesn't finally get back on top with Zen and Artic Islands its just going to get worse... And unless AMD has some magic recipe for low temps for Zen, their 40% IPC still can't touch what Skylake can do... As for AI... I'm not sure yet.

 

Actually, solder between bare die and IHS ended with Sandy Bridge, afaik. Ivy Bridge (not Ivy-E though) had paste and benefitted from delidding. Haswell was just disgusting.

 

I'll just torrent the Game-Ready drivers.

 

Devil's Canion has "Next Gen TIM", not solder BTW.

 

With the latest release of Geforce Experience, everything seems on track for them to eventually end up like Razer did in 2012:

GFE 3 ships with mandatory registration

Tomorrow they will tell us we need an account to be able to download the drivers needed for our GPU's to work.
And finally the day after tomorrow they will force us into linking a Microsoft Account with the Nvidia Account.

Because more invasive data mining is good for the consumer right? It's not like Nvidia doesn't have record profits and needs money to stay in business and in competition with AMD right? RIGHT?!

Until then, there's an easy fix to keep using your GFE 2.X version if you so desire:
Navigate to "Primary OS Partition\ProgramData\Nvidia Corporation\Geforce Experience\Update" and rename the setup file with whatever your heart desires. "NGreedia.exe" for example. And you will no longer be shown the nag screen to update to 3.0.

The alternative is to stop using the product altogether until Nvidia backs off from this invasive idea.

 

You should have waited two months for a 1 year anniversary necro.

 

Well, that took them little longer than expected yet still... Y?/! Why to have account for game optimizing?

 

"If you don't register an account or sign in to one, GeForce Experience 3 is dead weight sitting in the system tray and using up memory.

While you cannot use the program if you don't sign up for an account, you may still download display drivers from Nvidia. That's a manual process though and you won't benefit from other features that GeForce Experience offers."

I only install the Video driver, Physx, and HD Audio driver, I do a Custom Install and uncheck the other items and omit them from install - including GFE. It's the only way to be sure - don't install GFE.

 

@hmscott: GFE had one very useful thing going for it: Shadowplay. It had a minimal impact on fps during recording, but of course it used proprietary code. Hence, no other recording app is able to use it so we could rely on it and ditch GFE altogether.

However, while keeping myself up to date with the latest feedback in the Nvidia forum I stumbled on some bad news for us, notebook users:

So if some of you want to keep doing video tutorials during Windows/Linux desktop and use Shadowplay for recording, it will no longer work in the new version if you have a laptop with switchable graphics.
Nvidia, where less is more?

 

No, it didn't. NVFBC and NVIFR were available and usable by anyone. They denied non-approved programs using it in a later driver, so that people would use their minimalistic, feature-less recording software that they're not improving more. Theoretically if you wanted to use it you could install a version of say... MSI Afterburner prior to the driver update that killed it, and install a driver prior to the driver that killed it, and you would have much more efficient gameplay capture. But that won't help with newer titles so much, and basically limits users to Kepler cards, as far as I know.

 

it's a shame. I've since switched to Action! but it's not as efficient as Shadowplay.

 

Yeah. I'm mad my Action! license got revoked. I guess those Giveaway Of The Day things don't last so long. I really did like it.

In my case it's more about compatibility and usefulness. I'm using Afterburner now but it still has a CPU hit when using NVENC, unfortunately. Much less than Playclaw does, and no stupid game compatibility issues either, though the overlay itself isn't as nice.

 

So it's really good news after all, you can uninstall GFE and forget about it