We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

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Anonymous Bosch
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We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

Post by Anonymous Bosch »

The following video from Chris Titus Tech provides some mighty useful guidance to reduce the substantial bloat and telemetry ordinarily included with nVidia GeForce Experience drivers:



It basically boils down to first using Display Driver Uninstaller to safely and completely remove any existing nVidia drivers. And then using NVCleanstall to download and customise the nVidia driver package by removing components that you do not need or require.

Suffice to say, the process is surprisingly simple and straightforward, and definitely reduces bloat for anyone using an nVidia graphics card.
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Rumpy
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

Post by Rumpy »

In other words, exactly the same thing people have been doing before GeForce Experience came along ;)
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

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BTW Daehawk, the relevance of the bloat ain't about storage space, it's about reducing the pointless nVidia background processes and telemetry that are otherwise left running constantly with a standard installation. This is clearly illustrated at the beginning of the video above, when he uses TCPView to show all the nVidia background processes typically has running (and in contrast, he uses TCPView again towards the end of the video to illustrate that those processes are no longer running when drivers are installed using NVCleanstall).
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

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Ya I noticed that after watching the video so deleted my post. Still this type of bloat was something I worried about in the old days and kept stuff from running in my tray so I had more memory. These days I let it run for the handiness or updates and it tweaking my games video settings and such. Maybe one day when I upgrade Ill use this instead of the bloat.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

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Does he address whether it has any impact on either performance or stability?

FWIW, the data they're collecting consists of a hardware profile, what games people are running (as in how many people are running a particular game, not tied to individuals), and how those games are performing on their hardware with different settings. It's what powers the automated optimization function if you use it.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

Post by Kasey Chang »

Tried to redo my drivers and cut down on footprint of GeForce Experience... Didn't work. Despite having the app installed as stated in prerequisites by NVCleanStall GE couldn't enable the overlay or shadowplay.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

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Blackhawk wrote: Sat Apr 17, 2021 1:55 pm Does he address whether it has any impact on either performance or stability?

FWIW, the data they're collecting consists of a hardware profile, what games people are running (as in how many people are running a particular game, not tied to individuals), and how those games are performing on their hardware with different settings. It's what powers the automated optimization function if you use it.
Not in this particular video, but NVCleanstall has been around and stable since at least the end of 2019. Titus is a technically-adept Linux guy, so the focus of many of his Windows tutorials and guides tends to revolve around optimization, debloating, and safely removing needless telemetry. Suffice to say, he definitely has the knowledge and proficiency to squeeze the most out of both Linux and Windows systems, and speaking from personal experience, I have had no stability issues whatsoever in playing and running games with NVCleanstall-ed drivers. Because NVCleanstall basically provides complete and total control over precisely which components you wish to download and install with your nVidia drivers. So, for example, if you truly need Shield Wireless Controller support or particular GeForce Experience features, you can opt to include 'em. But for the vast majority of users, simply selecting the 'recommended' components within NVCleanstall provides rock solid stability minus the constantly-running telemetry and otherwise unnecessary background processes standard GeForce drivers leave you stuck with.
Last edited by Anonymous Bosch on Sat Apr 17, 2021 3:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

Post by Anonymous Bosch »

Kasey Chang wrote: Sat Apr 17, 2021 2:25 pm Tried to redo my drivers and cut down on footprint of GeForce Experience... Didn't work. Despite having the app installed as stated in prerequisites by NVCleanStall GE couldn't enable the overlay or shadowplay.
You may need to experiment with which other GeForce Experience Components need to be enabled within NVCleanstall. Also, using Display Driver Uninstaller to completely flush out any previous driver installations is often highly beneficial.

If you cannot get it working using NVCleanstall, you may want to try using NVSlimmer instead, which is a another utility that does much the same thing as NVCleanstall.

EDIT: This post from the NVSlimmer thread clarifies which components are required by various features:
forums.guru3d.com wrote:Display.Driver Standalone
NView requires Display.Driver
Optimus requires Display.Driver, Update.Core
Display.Update requires Display.Driver, Update.Core
DisplayDriverCrashAnalyzer requires Display.Driver
GFExperience requires Update.Core, NvBackend, NvNodejs, NvAbHub
GFExperience.NvStreamSrv requires VirtualAudio.Driver, NvContainer
HDAudio requires Display.Driver
NGXCore requires Display.Driver
Nodejs requires Display.Driver
NV3DVision requires Display.Driver
NV3DVisionUSB.Driver requires Display.Driver
NvAbHub requires NvContainer, NvTelemetry
NvBackend requires Update.Core, NvContainer, NvTelemetry
NvCamera requires Display.Driver
NvContainer requires Display.Driver
NvTelemetry requires Display.Driver
PhysX requires Display.Driver
PPC requires Display.Driver
ShadowPlay requires GFExperience, VirtualAudio.Driver, NvContainer, NvNodejs
Update.Core requires Display.Update, NvBackend, NvTelemetry
Last edited by Anonymous Bosch on Sat Apr 17, 2021 3:28 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

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The question was more about whether using his method makes the drivers more stable or the system perform better compared to the regular method.

Bloat isn't my favorite thing. Nor is telemetry. But do they have enough of a real impact to justify going through the process described here as opposed to the lazy option (just clicking 'Express Install' and 'yes' once GeForce Experience has auto-downloaded them)? Or is removing the bloat just saving a few dozen megabytes of disk space with no real benefit?

I will go through hassles to improve performance, but I generally won't just because the option exists.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

Post by Carpet_pissr »

Why use GeForce Experience at all? I haven’t used that garbage in a long time, or when I install it by accident which happens.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

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Blackhawk wrote: Sat Apr 17, 2021 3:21 pm The question was more about whether using his method makes the drivers more stable or the system perform better compared to the regular method.

Bloat isn't my favorite thing. Nor is telemetry. But do they have enough of a real impact to justify going through the process described here as opposed to the lazy option (just clicking 'Express Install' and 'yes' once GeForce Experience has auto-downloaded them)? Or is removing the bloat just saving a few dozen megabytes of disk space with no real benefit?

I will go through hassles to improve performance, but I generally won't just because the option exists.
You'd be hard-pressed to convince me that adding 500MB+ of bloat to driver installation packages does anything favourable for system performance and stability. Having said that though, I haven't done any comparative performance tests personally, though I noticed the following posted in the comments section of the video above:
Mark Turner wrote:Holy cow, what a diff. My main PC game is Battletech at moderate settings. After using these programs my GPU temp went from 54° down to 38° constant. Thx man.
Last edited by Anonymous Bosch on Sat Apr 17, 2021 4:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

Post by Blackhawk »

Carpet_pissr wrote: Sat Apr 17, 2021 3:33 pm Why use GeForce Experience at all? I haven’t used that garbage in a long time, or when I install it by accident which happens.
I use it for the Shadowplay feature (specifically the Instant Replay, which I use regularly.) There are other programs that have similar functionality, but they take significantly more system resources. OBS and Game DVR, for instance, have the same functionality, but they impact performance more than Shadowplay. So getting rid of GFE would gain me some performance, but I'd lose even more from the alternatives to the features I use.
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Re: We have been installing nVidia drivers WRONG!

Post by Kasey Chang »

Yeah, I use Shadowplay to record my Youtube stuff.
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