Nvidia plans to lock Game Ready drivers behind GeForce Experience registration

[ivan134]

I don't mind personally. I actually use GeForce Experience to control the LEDs on my GPUs and use ShadowPlay and GameStream. I think they should allow the choice, but I won't cry about it.

 

inb4 the AMD brigade comes in to decry NVIDIA with unsubstantiated claims (I've got no problem with people having objections, I just think the whole DAE NVIDIOTS thing is annoying)

Your "inb4" sounds more like a projection. It's also funny seeing someone who idolizes Ben Carson talking about unsubstantiated claims.

[ivan134]

It takes a while for it to load for everyone if you have it set to scan your system for games.

Is there a way to turn that off?

[Zah]

I don't mind the email bit, but the people in this thread scare me. You all praise GFE as if it runs flawlessly, but i've had nothing but issues out of it. Am i the only one that can click on the GFE logo or exe, an have to wait almost a full minute before it pops up on my screen? Before you ask, yes, i have an SSD (Samsung 850 Pro) and multiple re-installs did not fix it. It was also abysmal when using my Nvidia Shield (Half the time, i would get a dropped connection on my local network, even when using the router Nvidia specifically suggested, along with meeting every hardware requirement). That being said, i have not touched GFE since i sold my shield a few months back. If it has improved in that short amount of time, someone let me know, lol.

It hasn't REALLY improved, and I never use it except to update my drivers.  It just seems kinda silly that you HAVE to use Geforce experience to update it (which I only use to update it).

 

While I HAVEN'T had any problems at this moment, I used to, and as @Kloaked said, his drivers pretty much kill themselves when he updates through Geforce experience.

 

As for the e-mail, if you're using a personal e-mail for gaming stuff/promotional stuff you're a complete idiot who deserves the spam they get in their e-mail.  Also, Gmail automatically sorts promotions into a separate tab even, so I don't have to see that crap unless I want to.

[ltguy]

because burner emails addresses are so hard to come by...

[Zah]

Is there a way to turn that off?

 

Yes there is.  I haven't had it scan for games since I re-installed it because it's such a worthless function.

[Prysin]

let me guess. Nvidias next move after this will be to use those self-destructing chips into all SLI mobos to destroy your PC incase you buy AMD....

[MageTank]

let me guess. Nvidias next move after this will be to use those self-destructing chips into all SLI mobos to destroy your PC incase you buy AMD....

Do not turn this into a fanboy war. This has absolutely nothing to do with AMD. You hate it when Nvidia fanboys talk badly about AMD, and yet you do the same. You want it to end? Start with the man in the mirror.

 

[Prysin]

Do not turn this into a fanboy war. This has absolutely nothing to do with AMD. You hate it when Nvidia fanboys talk badly about AMD, and yet you do the same. You want it to end? Start with the man in the mirror.

 

What i hate about Nvidia is their continued effort to lock things down. Make things proprietary. Close their ecosystem.

 

They are turning into Apple.

 

i fucking hate apple, perhaps even more then zMeul hates AMD...

So yeah... i dont like this, it is just one more reason for me NOT to buy Nvidia even if they have better performance.

[Itereus]

I really don't understand how some people think this is good news. From what I understand, the only change this bring, is that you're required to actually use GFE as well as sign in to it. There is nothing good about this change, all it does is give less choice to consumers.

 

Want to sign in to GFE? Great, use it if you wish. But forcing this onto all users  who actually want to have updated drivers is just a silly move on Nvidia's part.

[Bojamijams]

This is fucking stupid.  GFE is slow and doesn't even allow you to specify a folder to download the video drivers and doesn't clean them up either so they just eat SSD space.

 

nVidia fanboys who see nothing wrong with this are also stupid. 

 

I bet you all raged when Microsoft announced forced windows updates but your fanboy glasses see no issue with being forced into using a slow buggy app that bloats like a whore.  Oh and did you forget the nvidia streamer service eating up CPU cycles and causing FPS drops?  Yeah that comes with GFE.  Enjoy the next time they break that again. 

 

god damn nvidia you're such a piece of crap company

[MageTank]

What i hate about Nvidia is their continued effort to lock things down. Make things proprietary. Close their ecosystem.

 

They are turning into Apple.

 

i fucking hate apple, perhaps even more then zMeul hates AMD...

So yeah... i dont like this, it is just one more reason for me NOT to buy Nvidia even if they have better performance.

So your reason for mentioning AMD (the brand you prefer) in this thread, is because Nvidia is turning into apple(a company you didn't even mention in that previous post)? You understand if i no longer take your opinions regarding AMD or Nvidia serious anymore, right? You've officially made yourself a target of bias. 

 

This practice you speak of has been done by many companies, even AMD in their past. Has AMD changed recently? Yes. They are now trying to push open standards, but not for the same reasons you think. If AMD was successful in marketing Mantle back then, it would have been a very early nail in the coffin of Maxwell. Async compute would have been readily available much earlier, and Maxwell would have met its end before the 980 Ti came out to put its thumb down on all of AMD's offerings. AMD knew this. Why do you think they were so happy when MS decided to push DX12 on the fast track? They won the moment that happened, because it finally made their superior hardware shine. People do not give AMD credit where they deserve it, but they really did think of the long term with their last few generations of GPU's. 

 

This was not some charitable act for "changing the world with open standards". It was as equally a strategic blow to Nvidia as it was a charitable notion towards everyone else. The same is said for Freesync. If Freesync were to catch on, Nvidia would lose out on the cash coming from those G-Sync modules, and it would remove an advertised feature from their marketing toolkit. Notice how G-Sync Ready is pasted all over their GPU's? Yeah, marketing. 

 

Hate Nvidia and their proprietary ideals all you want, but without them, we would not be seeing these current strides in technology. Without G-Sync, i doubt we would ever have seen Freesync. If we did, it would have been far longer of a wait. Mantle (At the time, completely AMD proprietary) was responsible for DX12 coming. They single-handedly  lit a flame under Microsoft to push them into action. DX12? Also 100% MS proprietary. where is your hatred towards MS? You only mentioned Apple. BTW, MS supports Khronos Group, the team behind Vulkan. An open alternative to DX12. Vulkan? Came from that proprietary API known as Mantle. 

 

Notice how it all comes full circle? Innovation, regardless of whether its open, or closed, inspires competition, which brings alternatives. Each will continue to push each other forward for the sake of all consumers. To hate a company because of it, would be silly, don't you think? 

[ACatWithThumbs]

It's not really a big deal for me the only thing that bothers me is that I won't be able to download the driver version I want unless they put that option into Geforce experience.
It's not like I have real driver issues but some drivers cause crashes with my OC so having the option to choose a specific driver is not something I want to miss.

[Guest Kloaked]

This is fucking stupid.  GFE is slow and doesn't even allow you to specify a folder to download the video drivers and doesn't clean them up either so they just eat SSD space.

 

nVidia fanboys who see nothing wrong with this are also stupid. 

 

I bet you all raged when Microsoft announced forced windows updates but your fanboy glasses see no issue with being forced into using a slow buggy app that bloats like a whore.  Oh and did you forget the nvidia streamer service eating up CPU cycles and causing FPS drops?  Yeah that comes with GFE.  Enjoy the next time they break that again. 

 

god damn nvidia you're such a piece of crap company

 

A-fucken-men.

[Bouzoo]

Spam? Like most others do.

 

Unsuscribe? 

[Ekpyrosis]

So your reason for mentioning AMD (the brand you prefer) in this thread, is because Nvidia is turning into apple(a company you didn't even mention in that previous post)? You understand if i no longer take your opinions regarding AMD or Nvidia serious anymore, right? You've officially made yourself a target of bias. 

 

This practice you speak of has been done by many companies, even AMD in their past. Has AMD changed recently? Yes. They are now trying to push open standards, but not for the same reasons you think. If AMD was successful in marketing Mantle back then, it would have been a very early nail in the coffin of Maxwell. Async compute would have been readily available much earlier, and Maxwell would have met its end before the 980 Ti came out to put its thumb down on all of AMD's offerings. AMD knew this. Why do you think they were so happy when MS decided to push DX12 on the fast track? They won the moment that happened, because it finally made their superior hardware shine. People do not give AMD credit where they deserve it, but they really did think of the long term with their last few generations of GPU's. 

 

This was not some charitable act for "changing the world with open standards". It was as equally a strategic blow to Nvidia as it was a charitable notion towards everyone else. The same is said for Freesync. If Freesync were to catch on, Nvidia would lose out on the cash coming from those G-Sync modules, and it would remove an advertised feature from their marketing toolkit. Notice how G-Sync Ready is pasted all over their GPU's? Yeah, marketing. 

 

Hate Nvidia and their proprietary ideals all you want, but without them, we would not be seeing these current strides in technology. Without G-Sync, i doubt we would ever have seen Freesync. If we did, it would have been far longer of a wait. Mantle (At the time, completely AMD proprietary) was responsible for DX12 coming. They single-handedly  lit a flame under Microsoft to push them into action. DX12? Also 100% MS proprietary. where is your hatred towards MS? You only mentioned Apple. BTW, MS supports Khronos Group, the team behind Vulkan. An open alternative to DX12. Vulkan? Came from that proprietary API known as Mantle. 

 

Notice how it all comes full circle? Innovation, regardless of whether its open, or closed, inspires competition, which brings alternatives. Each will continue to push each other forward for the sake of all consumers. To hate a company because of it, would be silly, don't you think?

MS being a member of Khronos Group does not make them an advocate of Vulkan. Khronos develops much more than Vulkan and they have about 100 members with all kinds of technology and software companies, not each of which is member of every working group. In particular, MS is not part of the Vulkan working group. source MS has implemented OpenGL ES on Windows Phone and WebGL in Edge, so they want to have word on how they are developed. To say that they support "the team behind Vulkan" is misleading.

Does the fact that sometimes proprietary technology can lead to industry-wide innovation imply that it is a biased to applaud another company for pushing open standards? Does it justify the business practices of that company? AMD doesn't make money from sold FreeSync monitors to begin with, and nothing stops Nvidia from enabling support in their drivers. Also, given that mobile Gsync works without a module, that module's necessity is dubitable. Open standards are open to Nvidia, too. If Nvidia chooses to refuse to use them, it's hardly AMD's fault. Intel already announced that they'll support adaptive sync in the future, aren't they a competitor as well? If a company delivers a strategic blow to one of their competitors by developing an open standard, the result is overall favourable to a proprietary strategic blow, so it could legitimately be called "charitable", as charity means public benefit.

 

And yes, if one company makes a decision that some disapprove of, they will mention if their competitors treat similar matters differently. It happens all the time, in every branch and it's, in principle, not about being a fanboy, it's about being comparative.

[Megahurt]

GFE is uterly useless for me, and it kept resetting my fps limiter, so I uninstalled it, it's nothing but bloathware to me.

[Centurius]

This is fucking stupid.  GFE is slow and doesn't even allow you to specify a folder to download the video drivers and doesn't clean them up either so they just eat SSD space.

 

nVidia fanboys who see nothing wrong with this are also stupid. 

 

I bet you all raged when Microsoft announced forced windows updates but your fanboy glasses see no issue with being forced into using a slow buggy app that bloats like a whore.  Oh and did you forget the nvidia streamer service eating up CPU cycles and causing FPS drops?  Yeah that comes with GFE.  Enjoy the next time they break that again. 

 

god damn nvidia you're such a piece of crap company

 

Couldn't care less about it, or the Windows Updates being required either. 

[MageTank]

MS being a member of Khronos Group does not make them an advocate of Vulkan. Khronos develops much more than Vulkan and they have about 100 members with all kinds of technology and software companies, not every of which is member of every working group. In particular, MS is not part of the Vulkan working group. [1] MS has implemented OpenGL ES on Windows Phone and WebGL in Edge, so they want to have word on how they are developed. To say that they support "the team behind Vulkan" is misleading.

Does the fact that sometimes proprietary technology can lead to industry-wide innovation imply that it is a biased to applaud another company for pushing open standards? Does it justify the business practices of that company? AMD doesn't make money from sold FreeSync monitors to begin with, and nothing stops Nvidia from enabling support in their drivers. Also, given that mobile Gsync works without a module, that module's necessity is dubitable. Open standards are open to Nvidia, too. If Nvidia chooses to refuse to use them, it's hardly AMD's fault. Intel already announced that they'll support adaptive sync in the future, aren't they a competitor as well? If a company delivers a strategic blow to one of their competitors by developing an open standard, the result is overall favourable to a proprietary strategic blow, so it could legitimately be called "charitable", as charity means public benefit.

 

And yes, if one company makes a decision that some disapprove of, they will mention if their competitors treat similar matters differently. It happens all the time, in every branch and it's, in principle, not about being a fanboy, it's about being comparative.

You are right. It was misleading for me to word it that way. My underlying point was, that two entities that are technically in competition with each other, still support each other, even if they make products that are in competition against each other. You also made that point with Intel supporting AMD's Freesync. 

 

I am not trying to belittle @Prysin. My point was his hatred towards one company is silly, when plenty of companies do it (even the one he favors). It has nothing to do with him praising AMD for their open standards. In fact, i agree with him that open standards are better for everyone. My point was that while it was charitable to some, the underlying intention of it was still a stab at their competition. Nvidia would not have put up a good fight against Mantle. This is already shown with the current DX12 titles we have seen. The 980 Ti just barely puts Nvidia ahead in their flagship card. The rest, fall below AMD's offerings. Had Mantle been adopted at the time they made it open for everyone (March of 2015), Nvidia would have been in trouble by the time they released the 980 Ti (May of 2015). Instead, Mantle was not adopted, and DX12 was not available until early August of 2015. This gave them a few more months to sell their cards, before people saw that their lifespan might be more limited than previously foreseen.

 

AMD knew this. They have been promoting Mantle's features for quite some time, and even their GCN1.0 hardware from 2012 had support for it. My other point was, AMD did not come out with Freesync until after Nvidia came out with G-Sync. AMD came out with it, because it could have potentially cost them customers, so they came up with a brilliant way of making an almost identical experience, but without the price premium. Because of Nvidia's proprietary hardware, AMD users (and now, Intel and potentially even more) get to use an amazing technology that drastically improves your gaming experience. Who knows for certain how long it would have been for this technology to show up, had a "proprietary" company like Nvidia not done it. You could make the argument that if it was open source to begin with, AMD wouldn't have had to do it, to which i would say "You are right". However, it did not go down that way. But since it did, we still ended up with a great alternative regardless.

 

As far as business practices goes, i tend to avoid this landmine on forums. No company is without sin in this category. Be it Intel fabricating Pentium benchmarks all those years ago, Nvidia and their "false advertisement" of the 3.5GB Vram debacle, or AMD advertising the Fury X as "the card for overclockers" even though at the time, it could not be overclocked. Everyone has skeletons in their closet, so i tend not to cast stones at these companies unless it directly damages the consumer. In the scenario's i provided, i have spoken about them on this very forum (except for the Pentium debacle, that was long before this forum existed). If you want my honest opinion on Nvidia's business practices regarding G-Sync, here it is. Do i think they should charge that $150 price premium for G-Sync? No, not really. Gsync has been proven to be a slightly superior technology(1) (2), but its worth, while subjective, can still be argued. I am a Price:Performance man. G-Sync just does not give that much of a performance difference to justify a $150 price premium over Freesync. Nvidia swears that Gsync Modules will be used for something else in the future, and that they can unlock more features out of it, i remain skeptical.

 

I do appreciate your insight on this, so thank you for taking the time to respond to my other post. Me calling him biased stems from him bringing up AMD in a thread that does not warrant it, and from past experience of seeing him bash Nvidia whenever he had the right opportunity. 

[Egad]

You don't even have to have a second email address if you don't want it with gmail.  You can just do your address+#@gmail.com.  For example egad@gmail.com and egad+1@gmail.com go to the same inbox.  But you can set a filter so whenever anything sent to egad+1@gmail.com comes in it is marked as read and stuck in a folder (or label as Gmail calls it) and never hits your inbox.  I just send it all to my trash where Google keeps it for 30 days and then purges it.

 

Still shitty of nVidia to want my email.  Although they already have my email and my Steam ID from back when I redeemed my game via them.  I assume they'll set up the emails to opt you in to their newsletter by default so they can pimp their new Netflix for Games thing.  

[Prysin]

You are right. It was misleading for me to word it that way. My underlying point was, that two entities that are technically in competition with each other, still support each other, even if they make products that are in competition against each other. You also made that point with Intel supporting AMD's Freesync. 

 

I am not trying to belittle @Prysin. My point was his hatred towards one company is silly, when plenty of companies do it (even the one he favors). It has nothing to do with him praising AMD for their open standards. In fact, i agree with him that open standards are better for everyone. My point was that while it was charitable to some, the underlying intention of it was still a stab at their competition. Nvidia would not have put up a good fight against Mantle. This is already shown with the current DX12 titles we have seen. The 980 Ti just barely puts Nvidia ahead in their flagship card. The rest, fall below AMD's offerings. Had Mantle been adopted at the time they made it open for everyone (March of 2015), Nvidia would have been in trouble by the time they released the 980 Ti (May of 2015). Instead, Mantle was not adopted, and DX12 was not available until early August of 2015. This gave them a few more months to sell their cards, before people saw that their lifespan might be more limited than previously foreseen.

 

AMD knew this. They have been promoting Mantle's features for quite some time, and even their GCN1.0 hardware from 2012 had support for it. My other point was, AMD did not come out with Freesync until after Nvidia came out with G-Sync. AMD came out with it, because it could have potentially cost them customers, so they came up with a brilliant way of making an almost identical experience, but without the price premium. Because of Nvidia's proprietary hardware, AMD users (and now, Intel and potentially even more) get to use an amazing technology that drastically improves your gaming experience. Who knows for certain how long it would have been for this technology to show up, had a "proprietary" company like Nvidia not done it. You could make the argument that if it was open source to begin with, AMD wouldn't have had to do it, to which i would say "You are right". However, it did not go down that way. But since it did, we still ended up with a great alternative regardless.

 

As far as business practices goes, i tend to avoid this landmine on forums. No company is without sin in this category. Be it Intel fabricating Pentium benchmarks all those years ago, Nvidia and their "false advertisement" of the 3.5GB Vram debacle, or AMD advertising the Fury X as "the card for overclockers" even though at the time, it could not be overclocked. Everyone has skeletons in their closet, so i tend not to cast stones at these companies unless it directly damages the consumer. In the scenario's i provided, i have spoken about them on this very forum (except for the Pentium debacle, that was long before this forum existed). If you want my honest opinion on Nvidia's business practices regarding G-Sync, here it is. Do i think they should charge that $150 price premium for G-Sync? No, not really. Gsync has been proven to be a slightly superior technology(1) (2), but its worth, while subjective, can still be argued. I am a Price:Performance man. G-Sync just does not give that much of a performance difference to justify a $150 price premium over Freesync. Nvidia swears that Gsync Modules will be used for something else in the future, and that they can unlock more features out of it, i remain skeptical.

 

I do appreciate your insight on this, so thank you for taking the time to respond to my other post. Me calling him biased stems from him bringing up AMD in a thread that does not warrant it, and from past experience of seeing him bash Nvidia whenever he had the right opportunity. 

i do not hate Nvidia per say, well more dislike them after their "recent" actions.

 

i hate the concept of closed eco-systems.

While they can be good, they also stifle competition due to patent trolling. Unfortunatly, patent trolling has become more and more widespread. More often then not as a tool to belittle or just shut down other companies for the hell of it.

 

Innovation is good, innovation is needed. But holding onto your innovation for too long will simply cripple it. No innovative idea is successful if the creator is the only one allowed to evolve it.

 

Just look towards smart-phones. if Apple had the "rights" to any form of smart phone, we wouldnt see much of a progress being made in that area.

If Elon Musk hadnt released patents tied to the battery systems in the Tesla Model S, then we would never see super long range electric vehicles for YEARS, maybe decades.

 

 

Want an example of when innovation failed due to being proprietary?

PhysX.... yeah, i went there.

PPU - great idea. Fucking marvellous. The idea of intergrating it into a GPU?! Even better.

Also, do not come here and feed me the bullshit that Nvidia wanted to sell licenses for PPUs. They never wanted and never will. CUDA was offered mostly due to the professional market needing a standard.

 

The whole idea of forcing people into your eco-system, or suffer. That is a practice that IS NOT NEEDED.

A closed eco-system should provide BONUSES on its members. Not incurr punishment on outsiders.

And inbefore you claim something like that is impossible to attain. No, it is possible. It is perfectly possible and well within the grasp of current technologies.

[EChondo]

Uh why? Why do I have to give them my email? Because they are forcing me now? But for what benefit? For one they're not telling us?

 

Uh, no thanks. I'll just get the drivers from someone else then.

 

Kthxbai.

[typographie]

I've been signed into Geforce Experience for ages now and it took reading this thread to even remember I had done it. Nvidia doesn't seem to do anything obnoxious with my e-mail. I do not let the program "optimize" my games, and it doesn't seem to interfere with anything on that front. I use it for checking for driver updates and for Shadowplay-related shenanigans.

 

But that said, a reduction of consumer options can never really be a positive and I'm certainly not celebrating this.

[MageTank]

i do not hate Nvidia per say, well more dislike them after their "recent" actions.

 

i hate the concept of closed eco-systems.

While they can be good, they also stifle competition due to patent trolling. Unfortunatly, patent trolling has become more and more widespread. More often then not as a tool to belittle or just shut down other companies for the hell of it.

 

Innovation is good, innovation is needed. But holding onto your innovation for too long will simply cripple it. No innovative idea is successful if the creator is the only one allowed to evolve it.

 

Just look towards smart-phones. if Apple had the "rights" to any form of smart phone, we wouldnt see much of a progress being made in that area.

If Elon Musk hadnt released patents tied to the battery systems in the Tesla Model S, then we would never see super long range electric vehicles for YEARS, maybe decades.

 

 

Want an example of when innovation failed due to being proprietary?

PhysX.... yeah, i went there.

PPU - great idea. Fucking marvellous. The idea of intergrating it into a GPU?! Even better.

Also, do not come here and feed me the bullshit that Nvidia wanted to sell licenses for PPUs. They never wanted and never will. CUDA was offered mostly due to the professional market needing a standard.

 

The whole idea of forcing people into your eco-system, or suffer. That is a practice that IS NOT NEEDED.

A closed eco-system should provide BONUSES on its members. Not incurr punishment on outsiders.

And inbefore you claim something like that is impossible to attain. No, it is possible. It is perfectly possible and well within the grasp of current technologies.

I already said i agreed with your open standard views. It is impossible for anyone to argue against that philosophy, even if they are very pro-Nvidia. You also misread me. I would never call it "impossible" for the tech industry to adopt full support of open standards. Such a claim would be stupid to make, given how the adoption of Linux distro's and other open source software has only been increasing as time goes on. 

 

By now, you should already know that i do not have any pre-determined preferences for a company. I throw my money in the direction that gives me the most performance for my dollar. Yes, some other factors sway my decision (power efficiency being one of them, as i am an ITX fanatic) but i always put myself first, not these companies. 

 

What it all stems down to, is the following questions. Is Nvidia Anti-competitive, and does it hurt consumers?

 

To answer these questions, we need to define them.

 

What is Anti-competitive? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices

 

Does Nvidia meet any of these requirements to be considered Anti-Competitive? Not that i am aware of, at least not without knowing what they spend to make their hardware. 

 

Does it hurt consumers?

 

Not really. At least, not in the short term. It technically falls under marketing strategy. Offering services your competition cannot. If your competition does offer these services, offer them at a cheaper price. Nobody had any adaptive refresh rate technology. Nvidia decided to make G-Sync. AMD saw people were interested in it, and made a free alternative. That's competition. It's also great for all consumers, because now fans of both sides have options.

 

Before you yell at me, i will say one thing about both of these previous questions. There is one thing Nvidia does, that is shady and answers both previous questions with a "most likely". Gameworks. This is where Nvidia potentially stifles competition in an anti-competitive way. This is also where Nvidia harms consumers (the ones that do not use their specific hardware). It is also surprisingly the one thing you did not mention in your post, that i would have wholeheartedly agree with. I do not believe it is right for a hardware company to get in bed with game developers, to make games run better, or look better, on a specific piece of hardware. This is anti-consumer at its core. Had G-Sync remained unchallenged, and still remained locked into only Nvidia cards, i would have put it in this category too, but they inspired AMD to come up with their own solution, so there is no point in complaining about that now.

 

To side-step your "impossible to attain" line, i will say this. As long as people continue to pay for these proprietary options, they will remain. A day will come when the free alternatives snuff out the paid, closed alternatives and the proprietary technology will become a thing of the past. However, that day will only come when it is no longer profitable to make proprietary technology.

 

I hope this wall of text was coherent, i took a break half way through to eat, and sort of forgot where i was going with it. 

 

TL:DR? Nvidia and AMD push each other forward. Gameworks sucks, and consumers come first. 

[Misanthrope]

Uh why? Why do I have to give them my email? Because they are forcing me now? But for what benefit? For one they're not telling us?

 

Uh, no thanks. I'll just get the drivers from someone else then.

 

Kthxbai.

 

If you're not an "up to date" gamer that's fine. However, there's definitively a culture of getting the latest game is no coincidence that suddely Twitch is filled with Battlefront streamers and that after Fallout 4 comes out it will probably surpass everything but LoL in terms of total viewers for a short while. So to a lot of people that actually do benefit from the latest drivers to help fix performance issues with brand new games, they're kinda forced into this.

 

Of course the sane thing would be for everybody to drop the "must play as soon as it's out" attitude though we're all guilty of buying into hype (I.E. me with Witcher 3) 

[bogus]

Really not a fan of this move. I just don't see any reason whatsoever why Nvidia wouldn't let me install drivers without giving them my email. You might say "why do you care if they want your email" but I think you should flip the question around, why does Nvidia want my email just because I want to install some driver? I really don't see Nvidia's justification that it "will reduce headaches for both casual and hardcore gamers" holds any water whatsoever.

 

 

This will just cause confusion because I am pretty sure those 80-90% who already use GFE don't have a login to Nvidia to use it. Nobody I know with an Nvidia card does at least.

Finnaly! After some pages I was thinking no one was going to say it!

This is wrong in so many ways... we are talking about drivers here - why should drivers be hostage of a email submission (I don't even know if it is in Double Opt-In)?

And this PR is so fucking bad! I cringed from what I just read and people are fine with it:

 

“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.

 

What the fuck is this?! Two camps in terms of gamers?! No you dumb fuck, you have clients who paid for their hardware and they can do what ever the fuck they want with it, they can play 1 game a year or 3 games a day, that's nothing of your god damn business.

 

“On the other side of the equation you have enthusiast gamers, who get excited about preloading a game (WTF?!), who want to play a game the day it comes out with all the bells and whistles(COMBO 2xWTF),” 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.(COMBO 3xWTF)”

 

There you go people, NVIDIA from now on has two groups of customers:

 

• a group of customers with subpar support, who won't get the best experience from the hardware they paid for. They will not get all the bells and whistles... no no no. They don't even want it! They will have to wait because they, apparenlty, are casuals who clearly don't care about the money they spent on the hardware. This group of people are so dumb, that they cannot simply postpone a driver update... no... the flow of driver updates is so big that they can't even handle it - so they won't get them!

 

• a group of customers WHO ACTUALLY THINKS THAT THEY WILL BE AKNOWLEGED AS ENTHUSIAST GAMER by NVIDIA (lol), via a EMAIL SUBMISSION, to get drivers updates. Because these guys can handle the shit out of the driver updates, oh boy!

 

This guy that worked for HardOCP and PCPerspective, writes this shit?

 

There you go people, NVIDIA once again via shitty PR (that makes me as a marketing professional cringe) is probably trying to make a email list of some hardcore fanboys, suckers, so they can fill them up with shit like christmas turkeys - I'm not saying that all of you who said that are fine with it are suckers, but trust me, you are a small fraction.

It's a matter of principles. NVIDIA is cherry picking the support they give to their customers all for the sake of gathering information to sell you more shit... of all the things they chose driver support for email fishing...

 

Edit:

Just to make this clear: I'm not saying that every company that asks for an email is bad, neither I am saying that NVIDIA is bad for asking you for an email - they are indeed bad for what is at stake here - bare this in mind:

 

It's driver support! You are being forced to give your email if you want to have access to the latest drivers! To the hardware you bought!

 

They are not asking for the email to access some exclusive content, some contest, some perks... no... it's purely driver support. I wonder what drivers they will send in the press kits... this fucking NVIDIA dude that worked for website reviewers forgot to mention that. If in the reviews will be mentioned that they tried this out with this GFE drivers, to get free press and influence people to submit their emails.

The media guys, such as linus, should just use the standard available drivers for reviews - which is the drivers that are available for everyone. Not under a submission wall.