Future Nvidia Game-Ready drivers will require registration
Nvidia revealed a massive list of changes coming to its GeForce Experience service that it ships as a standalone program and as part of the Nvidia driver package offered on the company website.
We reviewed the GeForce Experience service back in 2012 when it first came out. It was designed back then to provide PC users with an easy way to play games by configuring them for the best experience automatically.
While it is possible to configure games manually as well, the main appeal of GeForce Experience was that it did that automatically for you which was especially useful to gamers who did not want to be bothered going through the configuration manually, or had troubles understanding the different customization options that many PC games ship with.
GeForce Experience today is much more than that, and news on the official GeForce website highlight that. The new version, currently in beta, enables gamers to broadcast in 1080p at 60fps, to live stream to YouTube, or to use the GameStream feature to stream from PC to a larger screen using Nvidia's Shield.
If you scroll all the way down to the end of the article you will find out about another change that is coming in the future: mandatory email registration for users who want to use GeForce Experience.
According to Nvidia's announcement, GeForce Experience will be the only option to make use of Game-Ready drivers in the future.
Game-Ready drivers are released at around the same time that major PC releases are published. They offer optimizations for those games to ensure maximum compatibility and performance when playing these games.
This means that gamers who play cutting edge games regularly on a machine with an Nvidia card will only be able to benefit from these optimized drivers if they sign-up for an account, and log in to that account in the GeForce Experience software.
Everyone else will still get these optimizations when downloading regular Nvidia drivers but usually at a later point in time.
Update: Starting with Nvidia Geforce Experience 3.0, use of the software requires a Google or Nvidia account. Nvidia plans to make game ready drivers available separately on the other hand, at least for the time being.
Verdict
Considering that gamers pay hundreds of Dollars for video cards, it is somewhat puzzling that Nvidia decided to go down this route. While you could argue that handing over an email address is not the end of the world, it is unclear at this point in time what you permit Nvidia to do with it by accepting the terms of service of the application.
Nvidia notes that customers benefit from account registration as well as it plans to give away free game codes, beta access to games, hardware and other "cool stuff".
Now You: Would you sign up to receive the latest Game-Ready drivers?
Uninstalled Geforce Experience and won’t install/use it again until the forced requirement to have an NVidia login account is removed.
Have had enough with everyone wanting a login. Can’t keep track of them all and only use them once every now and then.
Anyway, it never picked up all the games on the PC to optimise settings, no matter how many folders I pointed it to.
It’s just a pain to revert to manually checking updates.
Wonder if this will be the death of Geforce Experience.
Never selected that Experience option after one try and seeing it start up on each boot.
AMD user here. AMD have raptr (a very similar thing, doesn’t require registration as yet) bundled with their drivers. The PC Master Race is not quite as tech savvy as they’d have you think if these apps are anything to go by. What IS annoying to me is that raptr clearly has some really clever people on the payroll (like the guy that developed RadeonPro) but seem to be using their skill set in the wrong direction.
bullshit!
I see absolutely NO problem here. I love my NVIDIA card and already have an account with them.
Why is it that it’s bad for a company who is investing a great deal of time, money and energy to make gaming a better experience to ask for you to give them your email address?
They don’t need my email address to provide drivers so that the product I paid them for operates correctly. They don’t need my email address to make gaming a better experience. How much you personally love your NVIDIA card is irrelevant.
You might have forgotten that you PAID them for the hardware! The box didn’t say “to receive the optimal hardware performance, you must ….”
You can’t change the rules midstream.
Unless you’re the only game in town, and then you can do whatever the f#ck you want. Just ask Comcast ;-)
Ask you say, what part of the article have I missed where it says they’re asking for email address?
I will never let such software install on my PC. If it becomes mandatory i will use older or hacked drivers!!!
The last time I installed a NVIDIA (I have a $250 card bought last year) driver in Windows it was bloated with 7 or 8 more apps like the GeForce Experience… I selected only the driver and proceeded, everything worked as expected, I don’t know why I should want to register for stupid things like that. The Linux method is simpler, they provide the driver and a simple settings GUI and CLI, that’s all.
^^ This.
The world is going insane. Especially the tech world. You can see the same trend amongst all these big companies … Google, MS, Nvidia, among others. Consumers are far too willing to bend over and be controlled, IMO, which allows companies to get away with these things.
A nation of sheep breeds a government – or in this case corporations – of wolves and you get more of what you tolerate.
Perfectly stated. and btw, see “Kasey’s” response below as an example of this.