If you are a seasoned MegaGames reader, chances are you are used to downloading and updating your graphics card drivers quiet often. For better or worse, NVIDIA plans to make that a thing of the past.
According to , NVIDIA will make its new Game Ready drivers available exclusively through GeForce Experience before the end of the year. And if that's not enough, users will have to register with a valid email address before being able to download the drivers through GFE.
Gamers will still be able to download new drivers from NVIDIA.com and through Windows Update, but those drivers will be "limited to quarterly releases for bug fixes, new features, security updates and so on."
Currently, a new Game Ready GeForce driver is typically released alongside every major AAA title to make sure it runs as smooth as possible. Obviously, making it harder to download those drivers is not in the best interest of gamers, but NVIDIA argues otherwise.
"We kind of have two camps in terms of gamers," explained Nvidia’s 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," added Pelletier. "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."
GeForce Experience provides plenty of useful services such as auto game settings optimization, recording and sharing in-game videos and streaming games to NVIDIA SHIELD. Those are all useful features, but a lot of hardcore gamers don't really care for them. See, hardcore gamers like to tweak their game settings manually and they are not inclined to waste any of their precious GPU cycles on video recording.
Either way, it is hard to believe that any gamer worth his salt will sacrifice Game Ready drivers just to avoid GeForce Experience or to keep NVIDIA away from his email… Or would you?
