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Nvidia will Soon Lock Game Ready Drivers Behind GeForce Experience Registration

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  • Nvidia will Soon Lock Game Ready Drivers Behind GeForce Experience Registration

    In what can only be called a "really stupid move" by everybody outside of Nvidia, the company is soon going to lock their ever popular Game Ready Drivers behind a GeForce Experience registration. Right now, all it takes to download any of Nvidia's drivers is to head over to their site, select your preferred update path (WHQL, Beta, etc.), select your operating system and bam, new drivers are yours to install as you wish. Alternatively, fans can also simply use the optional GeForce Experience desktop program to download the latest drivers as they're available.

    According to PC World, a switch will happen around mid-December that will force people to only get the latest Game Ready drivers through the GeForce Experience.
    Sometime in mid-December, however, you’ll be able to install Game Ready drivers only via GeForce Experience—and even then only after you’ve registered a verified email address with Nvidia. The drivers you can grab on GeForce.com or via Windows Update will be limited to quarterly releases for bug fixes, new features, security updates and so on. More frequent Game Ready drivers will be GFE-only.

    This is undoubtedly an incredibly stupid and senseless move on the part of Nvidia. Why lock these driver updates behind a program many people find obtrusive?
    We kind of have two camps in terms of gamers,” Nvidia’s Sean Pelletier said in a group call with journalists. “On one hand you have the gamer that’s just casually playing things here and there, using their system for daily use and gaming on the side. They don’t want to be inundated with these [Game Ready] drivers…

    “On the other side of the equation you have enthusiast gamers, who get excited about preloading a game, who want to play a game the day it comes out with all the bells and whistles,” Pelletier continued. “That’s obviously the demographic we’re looking at for Game Ready drivers. We’re targeting GFE as a single-source destination for those gamers.”

    Look, Nvidia, I play games quite a bit on my PC. I also update my drivers on a very regular basis. I manually do so via drivers I download on my own from your website. Why do I not want your GeForce Experience to do this for me? Because I do not want it installed on my machine. It's an added layer of fluff that I don't want running. I don't make use of the features within it and I have no desire to. I don't want it automatically downloading new drivers or even just checking for new drivers. It's not for me. I also don't like the idea of drivers popping up on my system that I may not need or even having it check and inform me of updates. I use selective installs for your drivers because the last time I didn't, something went a little crazy in your drivers that resulted in multiple GIGS of files being created in my Windows directory!

    You are artificially making your GeForce Experience a requirement to have the latest drivers and that is one incredibly shitty move. None of the reasons provided by Pelletier in the above quote even make the slightest bit of sense. Your own website was already the "single-source destination" for grabbing those drivers. Your reasoning is a load of crap, pure and simple. Limiting consumer choice has never, and will never be a good thing. In fact as far as bad ideas go, this is right up there with Windows 10 forcing new driver installs on everybody whether they want (need) them or not.
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