Nvidia Will Require Geforce Experience Users And Email Signups

When Sheryl Crow warbled a change would do you good back in 1997, she probably wasn’t thinking something along the lines of what Nvidia has planned for users. The graphics card giant is making some sweeping changes to how users grab the latest game-ready drivers. GeForce owners will now be required to register for its GeForce Experience app with an email address.


When the update is implemented in December, Game Ready driver updates for the biggest games will only be available through the GeForce Experience app. Up to date drivers will not be available to download manually from Nvidia’s website. Instead, Nvidia will be posting quarterly driver updates bundling together all the changes every three months. Game Ready drivers are Nvidia’s efforts to get an update out for day one of large game launches. This optimised driver, Nvidia claims, will provide the best possible gaming experience. As it stands Nvidia estimates around 90% of driver installs happen through its GeForce Experience program anyway, so it doesn’t expect these changes to be a problem for many.
“We kind of have two camps in terms of gamers,” said Nvidia’s senior product manager Sean Pelletier. “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. 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.” There’s some other changes also coming to the GeForce Experience to sweeten the deal. GameStream is now available in 4K, 60FPS and with 5.1 surround sound if you’ve got the bandwidth to handle it, and a GTX 900-series card, while ShadowPlay is being updated for 1080p streaming to both Twitch and YouTube. Nvidia has said it has further plans for the service as well, including distributing game codes.