Hey PC sales are flagging, let's annoy the crap out of the bleeding edge users!
Annoyance is subjective.
90% of users seem to prefer GFE over web downloads.
No matter how many features they integrate with Geforce experience, never going to install it. It sucks NVidia is forcing its users to install GeForce experience if they are to get latest WHQL drivers.
Why NVidia why ?
Maybe you don't but I have to and I only need the video driver nothing else. I know this might sound crazy and all but just imagine this: out of the 7 billion people living on this planet some of them need different things than you do. I know, crazy but that's the way it is.
90% of users have moved on and use GFE instead.
I have a theory on why 90% is the number nV is seeing (and no, I am not part of those 90% - I like my archive of many driver versions): people are actually upgrading their drivers now, because instead of needing to go online, filling in a form, picking the driver version you want from the list, waiting for the download to complete and then installing, they can set GFE to just download everything in background and when it's ready, they get a prompt, click a button and 5minutes later, it's all installed, without even needing a reboot!
Here's the problem. I uninstall my nvidia drivers before installing the new ones. Otherwise you get a bunch of driver revisions on your PC.
And you're that space constrained? 240GB SSDs aren't expensive anymore, so get some more space for yourself.
But can you chose not to download it? I remember when a video driver file was 48MB big and that was much. Now what do we have? 200MB + ? I bet with all these "features" that I don't care about it will be more like 300MB. For me this is not really a problem, I have unlimited 1Gbps. BUT a lot of people have really bad internet and monthly download caps and they are forced to download all this stupid stuff. I have a USB stick that I got for free from my ISP that has a 5GB monthly cap, after you download 5GB the download speed turns to crawling and it's like the internet in 1998
Now if this was the only internet access I had I would be really angry if I had to download a 300MB file each time I have to upgrade my video driver.
Welcome to modern driver development, where you basically have to patch game code on the fly. All those patches get bundled in the driver.
Following your comment, I went and repacked bits of the 358.50 driver installer using 7-Zip, with Ultra preset changed to use LZMA2 compression and a "solid" block size. Here's how I fared:
Full bundle (704MiB unpacked) : 289MiB (296 587KiB), near-identical to the exe self-extracting package on geforce.com (296 570KiB). Not surprising, given nV uses 7-zip to pack their drivers in the first place.
Drivers-only with PhysX (457MiB Unpacked): 235MiB (241 057 KiB). Folders included: Display.Driver, Display.Optimus (required for many laptops), Display.Update, HDAudio, PhysX, Update.core.
Drivers-only without PhysX (281MiB Unpacked): 217MiB (222 592 KiB). Folders included: Display.Driver, Display.Optimus (required for many laptops), Display.Update, HDAudio, Update.core.
I think you'll agree that the base driver is a massive piece of not very compressible binary code. Sure, you could save a bit of driver size by cutting the extras out, but in the grand scheme of things, it's a small number. Secondly, GFE has full access to all the version info, so when GFE downloads, it should be able to download only the parts that have been updated, which would save that bandwidth you so care about. As for installed size, the world hasn't given a shit since about 2005. Sorry we don't care anymore.
