So, NV's basically telling me to "f*** off". They block their my country from accessing their website, and now they make more difficult to acquire the drivers from third party sources :/
You can thank the USA for that, since they have an active full embargo on Sudan right now. Sadly, nV is not it's own country, and has to abide by US law.
Would be nice if they'd use incrimental updating and not bloody 300MB packages each time...
The first should include only core drivers and NOT ANY FRIGGING GAME/APP/.EXE SPECIFIC PROFILES FFS! So the concept of "game ready drivers", that only update the .exe specific profiles, is so utter bullexcrement, because those profiles SHOULD NOT EXISTS AT ALL INSIDE DRIVER PACKAGE IN THE FIRST PLACE!
NVIDIA SHOULD IMPLEMENT ANOTHER MECHANIC TO UPDATE THOSE PROFILES WITHOUT UPGRADING DRIVERS THAT DON'T NEED UPGRADE!
The way their current driver architecture is setup, It seems to be near-impossible, since the core of the driver and all game profiles (I say game profiles.. some of them are much more intensive and include dynamic patching of game GPU calls into better ones better suited for their architecture. AMD does the same as well) are built into (obfuscated) binary blobs. Eventually they may split it out, but that seems highly unlikely due to competitive advantages they hold over AMD from their drivers.
I'd love to see incrimental driver updating like antiviruses are doing for decades (small updates of only file sthat actually changed) with simple control panel to rollback to old driver or even option to rollback to any other previous version. That would be so cool.
This way they could save tons of bandwidth, deliver updates to users in matter of minutes and give them instant option to rollback to old version if something doesn't work ok. It's how driver updating and game profiles should be done in freaking 2015.
I suspect this is exactly why they're doing this, and why geforce.com drivers are being shifted to quarterlies instead.
I'll do my best
Check out the guys from laptopvideo2go.com . They've been ripping drivers out of the darkest corners (including stuff like windows updates) for well over 10 years now, and patching the infs to give full support for all GPUs for every package.
It really makes sense if 90% are using NVIDIA Experience and whats nice is that NVIDIA Experience is very neat.
Yup.
I have it installed for ShadowPlay anyway, so ultimately a non issue for me.
I have to agree. I'm one of those guys who usually installs nothing. I have ROG and other software bundle heavy mainboards and I did not install any of those software, same with my soundcards, etc.... but I installed GE because of ShadowPlay and I did not regret it at all. It sits there and does zero bad for me, + the costless recording with my maxwell2 is really nice. (I do not use any of the other features tho, didn't even scan for my games yet)
Love Shadowplay, especially the last 5 minutes cache I can dump to disk when something awesome or really confusing happens.
You want drivers give us all your details so we can at the very least spam your e-mail box.
Where did i say that the adverts would be in the apps or apps only ?? They are asking you for your email address, they can spam you about new products, games and new marketing tie-ups - that move alone can generate money for them. Also, i am pretty sure they have something more in mind, here's hoping we all find out soon.
I've given them my email address, I receive nothing that I haven't explicitly agreed to.
Wow, so now I have a program to automatically put settings to what it thinks is best... It doesn't even make changes on the actually big out-of-menu options that many games have. Not to mention the game recorder and streaming utility are pretty pathetic compared to something like OBS, which can also use NVenc (thanks nvidia for that one
)
Not saying that I'd use any AMD equivalent either...
These programs are just pathetic excuses for them not to fix the horribly out of date driver config menu.
Not to mention how much I loathe auto updates...
In the middle of a tournament match? AUTO UPDATE
In the middle of an interesting video or stream? AUTO UPDATE
In the middle of some important work? YOUR UPDATE HAS BEEN INSTALLED: RESTART NOW
There are many programs guilty for this, and GFE is one of them. What about if I just don't want to update every WHQL cycle?
Exactly, if I need to optimize stuff for any reason I can do it far better myself than any program can. Same goes for these auto OC things, especially with intel pushing past 4GHz stock on many of their CPUs...
There is nothing silent about nvidia updates or game setting application, and no reboot needed for GPU updates since Vista, so please, can the FUD. Personally, I let nvidia set the settings, and tweak from there, the defaults are hand-chosen by nV employees for each GPU, then pushed out.
Don't see why corporate would want this, other than for applying updates over a large array of workstations. But I doubt GFE uses any kind of caching system for P2P so it reduces network load...
There are probably programs to remote install this kind of thing across multiple machines anyway.
If you're in corporate IT, you're not generally getting updates from the mainstream channels - you either stick to OEM/vendor sites because of certification reqs, or you're big enough to have direct access to nVidia.
What pisses me off is that they are FORCING GFE. I've tried using GFE, but it is a really clunky program to be fair and I have no use for it... So I download and install manually on my own update schedule.
No forcing, just that not using GFE means drivers every 3 months instead of every major game release.
Why would Nvidia require GFE with Quadro and Tesla
when the boards don't support GFE?
Last time I saw someone try to install GFE on a workstation ( to play around with ShadowPlay) last year, all it did was act as download manager. The driver was all that was installed. If Nvidia state that the GFE bundling is for GeForce drivers, you either take it as such, or just make a whole load of assumptions based on no actual information. Personally, I'd rather spend time on facts rather than trying to induce a panic attack. Why the hell GFE would be mandatory for a Tesla math co-processor escapes me.
Quite annoying I agree. Where does nV get off thinking Quadro users will never play games?I want my game profiles on my Quadro laptop (it was second-hand, cheap and powerful) damnit!
That's what I said, didn't I? I don't care about GFE; it's the fact they only want to provide the most recent drivers through GFE that's causing the controversy and, as noted, GFE is already capable of taking that role over on Quadro too.
For the record, I always uncheck Gaming Evolved too. Where I come from, software like these are considered bloatware. Since when did bloatware become acceptable?
It became acceptable when people put a value on convenience, and GFE is really convenient if you set it up right (enable background downloads). And ShadowPlay. And game streaming (which is built on shadowplay) for those with a Shield. I think gamestreaming to other PCs is almost done as well, but not sure.
Anything that's not required to make the device function is bloatware. GeForce Experience and Gaming Evolved both check that box. Arguable, CCC and the NVIDIA Control Panel also do but you'd have to go back over a decade to find drivers that didn't use them (they embedded advanced display options under Display Properties -> Advanced, coincidentally, where they belong). Graphics drivers, by themselves, are no more than 50 MiB. Both AMD and NVIDIA driver packages now have north of 200 MiB worth of bloat and they seem quick to add even more. Are these things users even requested in the first place?
Still not required. you can uncheck the box, and deal with quarterly updates instead. For the rest of us, we'll take convenience and shadowplay.
I generally agree with that statement. If it is not something you need right now, it shouldn't be running. Case in point: I never liked the idea of having to run Steam to run a Steam title. Someone posted a picture of all of the services and applications NVIDIA drivers install these days (without opting out). The list is lengthy and several of them pose potentially pretty big security threats because they leave network ports open. Steam is doing more and more of that lately as well. These are nothing I'm in favor of. These are things that should be disabled by default. These are things that users should have more control over. Microsoft is guilty of much the same with Windows 10. Instead of security getting tighter it seems to be systemically getting weaker.
Steam has an in-game UI, and DRM enforcement. As for network security issues, use a goddamn firewall if you're worried about instrusions.
Yep, get that in your small head, at this moment the only program running on my PC is Mozilla Firefox. Nothing else. And I have nothing else to tell you.
Uh-huh. Yes, really.
How about audiodg.exe for your audio? or the firefox update checker? Or the UI shell (taskbar, folders, shortcuts, desktop, explorer)? or the external plugins like Flash and Java? Or the Font host? or the other 120-odd extra windows services all hidden behind svchost.exe? I'm calling bullshit.
I tend to agree. Drivers, of all kinds, should be left to the user to decide. If a professional (not a domain controlled environment, mind you) wants to update to the latest drivers then he/she should be able to. If he/she does not, then he/she ought to be able to opt out.
In my opinion, we should be talking about fourseparate things:
1) the graphics driver (inf, sys, etc.)
2) an automatic driver updater (could be a light weight application that delays start to check for new updates)
3) AMD CCC & NVIDIA Control Panel
4) AMD Gaming Evolved & NVIDIA GeForce Experience.
The first is required and is reasonable for Windows Update to fetch this when it using Microsoft's standard VGA driver, the second should be opt-out because most people will want to keep drivers current, the third should be opt-in because most of the important features can be handled by the operating system itself (e.g. multi-monitor support), and the fourth should be a complete separate installer (not unlike PhysX) so only people that want it will get it.
2 is merged into 3 or 4: GFE takes over the update interface, because it's the thing with all the extra features. When you don't have GFE, it shows up under the CPL
3, the control panels were split off from the windows tabs because of a combination of deprecation, being a massive PITA to find, and restrictive in terms of sanely adding in more options. It also means that if I have a borked nv/AMD CPL, I don't also have a broked basic windows control panel, so recovery is much saner.
4, Still optional.
