Hacker News Reader

Comment by Toorkit | Hacker News Reader

On Windows you have to either download the driver updates manually, or install that GeForce Experience thing that keeps them up to date for you.

View on HN

There's a third party utility program you can use, it notifies you of new versions and lets you skip installing a lot of the bloatware like GeForce. I think it's called NV Install.

GeForce Experience is optional.

I can't fathom why people want to abstract something as simple as downloading the drivers straight from Nvidia and installing it, but then again people (perhaps rightfully) don't understand WTF a computer is.

In the past, GeForce Experience had game streaming functionality. Similar to VNC, but using hardware-accelerated video codecs, and supports joysticks and sound.

GeForce Experience removed the game streaming feature in 2023, but the protocol was reverse-engineered, and there's compatible third-party tools for game streaming.

Sunshine is the server, and Moonlight is the client.

It works a lot better than Miracast.

It was working also on devices like the Shield.

Umm no it didn't. The game streaming is still there and I use it literally every day to access my windows PCs from my macs.

I download drivers straight from nvidia.com and it takes many steps: go to drivers page, choose product series, choose product (choices don’t seem to matter but who knows if that’s gonna change at some point), click start search, click on the search result to go to driver page, click download, run installer, click click click click click. It’s a hassle compared to updating just about anything else on my machines.

I only do it because (1) GeForce Experience requires logging in with Nvidia account and seems to log me out every time; (2) when GeForce Experience updates the driver it seems to pause forever doing god knows what between finishing the download and starting to install.

>(choices don’t seem to matter but who knows if that’s gonna change at some point)

They do matter, you're just lucky(?) always using hardware and software environments that are always covered by the first thing on the list.

If you don't want to specify details and run an installer, that's squarely a You problem.

That you “can’t fathom” why people want to automate a multi-minute chore is a “You problem”, really.

I read that as “no matter what I choose I get the same file but I still make the correct choice because Nvidia knows better than I do.”

"I can't fathom why people want to abstract something as simple as downloading the drivers straight from Nvidia and installing it, but then again people"

I think I do understand WTF a computer is, yet at some point I also had a tool on windows installed, that automatically downloaded ALL of the drivers for all devices.

Convenient, but the main reason I installed the thing was, because it could install drivers I did not even find on official websites.

But just out of curiosity, if you understand what a computer is, why do you prefer manual labour and look down on people who automate things?

>why do you prefer manual labour

Because driver updates I didn't strictly need have historically ruined my day more often than not.

No, I'm not grabbing this driver update either. My Nvidia drivers are years old but they work fine, and I have better things to do than troubleshoot borkage stemming from drivers I didn't need to fix.

Remember: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

>and look down on people who automate things?

The specific audience here should know better than to delegate updates (let alone updates for system components) to some nebulous automated and/or all-in-one construct provided by third-parties to the hardware/driver vendor.

There’s some weird desire for product managers working on the windows platform to build “Dashboards” in front of the most simple things.

It is advertising.

Perhaps people understand that having to accept so-called fixes from the source of such a serious problem is highly stressful.

NVCleanInstall, maybe? I couldn't find anything called "NV Install".

Personally I'm still running with the drivers that came with the box when I bought it in 2020. GeForce Experience is an abomination; besides the mind-boggling bloat, demanding that I create an account just to download a driver update really made me determined never to buy NVidia ever again.

GeForce Experience is optional.

Yes, apologies I was on my phone earlier and didn't find it from a quick search. But I just checked my laptop and that's the one I'm using. I allows stripping out some telemetry and a few other things beside GeForce experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com