They’ll also require GeForce Experience
Here’s a quick rundown of how development on big PC games often works. When a developer is working on a AAA game, a team or a person from graphics card producers Nvidia or AMD will often be embedded into the studio to help improve performance on their company’s hardware as much as possible.
That’s why you’ll have games with “Optimised for Nvidia” and the like in the splash screens. Unlike AMD, Nvidia uses this time with the developers to help make “Game Ready Drivers.” Most of the major releases of the year will come with a driver, and often they’ll make some pretty major changes to the games to make them work as well as possible on a customer’s PC.
Up to now, the majority of GeForce experience features (Shadowplay, driver updates, game optimisation, etc.) have been usable without needing to log into it at all. It’s just a program that sits on your computer and does its thing, and plenty of people really like it. For the sake of comparison for AMD users, the closest equivalent will be the Gaming Evolved program we’re lumped with.
The problem is that with the new GeForce Experience update, people are finding they’re unable to install these new game ready drivers until they’ve registered and given Nvidia their details. More and more of these game ready drivers are becoming exclusive to GeForce Experience, and those will now require you to have an account with Nvidia.
Some users don’t have any problem with this new changes. After all, it’s registering for a free account and once you’re logged in you can forget all about it.
For other people though concerns about privacy and protecting your information is ringing alarm bells: your PC and any information GeForce Experience collects might now be associated with an account.
You either trust Nvidia with your email address and any other information they take, or you don’t get some fairly basic functionality of your video card. PC World points out that it’s actually benefiting Nvidia more than the customer, who’ve already bought an expensive piece of hardware.
Another problem this may cause is that if these drivers are exclusive to a piece of software, as opposed to being able to download them off of the Nvidia site as you could before, then that is requiring another piece of perceived “bloatware” to be installed on the system. Some people are very specific about what they allow installed on their gaming PCs, so for them having to install GeForce Experience isn’t a good move at all.
This does feel off to me, that’s for sure.
Nvidia plans to lock Game Ready drivers behind GeForce Experience registration [PC World]
