HrachBlog

GeForce Experience

The NVidia vs. AMD competition is less of a debate, and more of a fact of life at this point. AMD will continue to play second fiddle and make better value graphics cards, but if you value performance over all else you will always buy NVidia. This unchanging market has started to become anti-consumer in recent years. NVidia has slowly begun to abuse its market dominance to both raise the price of cards, and push more and more unnecessary products on its users.

The latest in this series of business decisions is the update to GeForce Experience. For those who are unaware, GeForce Experience is a program which downloads optimal settings for games based off of your system specs and includes a number of utilities provided by NVidia such as shadowplay. No one ever uses either of these two features, and instead, GeForce experience is nothing more than a glorified auto-updater for graphics drivers. Gone were the days of going to a website, downloading an installer, and running it every time there was a minor update to the graphics driver. For a brief, glorious, period, GeForce Experience did all of the above features with the added bonus of downloading and installing updated drivers when they became available. And then version 3.0 came out.

Starting in version 3.0, usage of GeForce Experience requires the user to create an account, the reasoning being that NVidia can sync settings between your computers. This is a load of grade A bullshit. I don't want my setting synced across my computers, I only have one computer with an NVidia graphics card, and if I had a laptop with one, I'd want to have a different set of in-game settings because it would be a less powerful machine. The only thing I want GeForce Experience to do is to connect to NVidia's website and download drivers. This now requires I be logged in to NVidia's bullshit service. We all know the reason they are doing this is to generate user profiles for advertisers. Once they can associate your playing and purchase habits with a username, they can use that information for market research and to sell advertising space. It is a disturbingly common practice in this day and age, and the worst part is I'll still use it. NVidia makes their installers such a pain to download and use and they know most people will be like me and simply deal with it because the convenience of using their service beats out their archaic and needlessly painful old install process. The only reason they can get away with this shit is because AMD hasn't managed to put out a truly competitive card in years.

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