Nvidia's New GeForce Experience 3.0 Requires Mandatory Registration (pcworld.com)

An anonymous reader writes: With the newly released GeForce Experience 3.0 software, Nvidia might irk some users. While you will still be able to download the drivers from their web site sans registration, You will now be required to register in order to use the GeForce Experience software While the Experience software does add some powerful streaming features for games and is "three times faster and consumes 50 percent less memory than the old GeForce Experience," it might seem like a bit of overkill for those users that only used the software to keep their drivers up to date.

Comments

Can we knock-off the data mining now?

[H3lldr0p]

Hey Marketing and Execs,

You're not going to get any useful data out of things like this. Those people you've decided to ignore? The ones who brought up the statistics which made your eyes glaze over and your money-boner wilt? Well, they're correct. There's nothing new to be discovered in terms of trends or about the people purchasing your products. All the data you need about those people has already been captured at the point of sale. In fact, all you really need to know is the fact that you sold another one of your products. Forcing them to register a piece of spyware, and we really need to be honest that is what this is, isn't going to do anything but hurt you in the long term.

Now, you may be of the mindset that you're going to be out in another job in the next business cycle. That's fine, but just know that future employers are going to looking closer and closer at your results. If all you can show them is a net loss of Good Will (I'm talking about the accounting term here, not the general sentiment the purchasing public has towards your products, although that does play a factor in determining the value of said term) they're going to be much less inclined to hire you. So it's really in your own best interests if you take that step back, look at the larger picture of what's going on, and ask yourself if this is wisest decision you could be making on behalf of the brand and company that you're working for.

Bad Manners

[ewhac]

I wrote about this last week, when I installed the latest update, and found myself unable to access any of the additional features without creating a cloud-based login -- to access locally-hosted features. Apparently someone at NVIDIA with severe cranial intrusion injuries took a look at what Razer did with their Synapse 2.0 software, and thought it was so fabulous they had to do it, too.

The only vaguely useful feature GeForce Experience provided was ShadowPlay, NVIIDA's own screen capture video recorder. However, there are plenty of third-party offerings that accomplish the same thing. I could create a fake ephemeral email address or hack the registry to make it work, but frankly the features it provides do not merit the effort. I have since uninstalled GeForce Experience 3.0, leaving just the drivers.

Now that they've (unnecessarily and gratuitously) made the cloud login mandatory, I would also be interested to see some security researchers dig in to GFE3 to see how well NVIDIA is protecting people's login credentials...