Future Nvidia Game-Ready drivers will require registration

Nvidia revealed a massive list of changes coming to its GeForce Experience service that it ships as a standalone program and as part of the Nvidia driver package offered on the company website.

We reviewed the GeForce Experience service back in 2012 when it first came out. It was designed back then to provide PC users with an easy way to play games by configuring them for the best experience automatically.

While it is possible to configure games manually as well, the main appeal of GeForce Experience was that it did that automatically for you which was especially useful to gamers who did not want to be bothered going through the configuration manually or had troubles understanding the different customization options that many PC games ship with.

GeForce Experience today is much more than that, and news on the official GeForce website highlight that. The new version, currently in beta, enables gamers to broadcast in 1080p at 60fps, to live stream to YouTube, or to use the GameStream feature to stream from PC to a larger screen using Nvidia's Shield.

If you scroll all the way down to the end of the article you will find out about another change that is coming in the future: mandatory email registration for users who want to use GeForce Experience.

According to Nvidia's announcement, GeForce Experience will be the only option to make use of Game-Ready drivers in the future.

Game-Ready drivers are released at around the same time that major PC releases are published. They offer optimizations for those games to ensure maximum compatibility and performance when playing these games.

This means that gamers who play cutting edge games regularly on a machine with an Nvidia card will only be able to benefit from these optimized drivers if they sign-up for an account and log in to that account in the GeForce Experience software.

Everyone else will still get these optimizations when downloading regular Nvidia drivers but usually at a later point in time.

Considering that gamers pay hundreds of Dollars for video cards, it is somewhat puzzling that Nvidia decided to go down this route. While you could argue that handing over an email address is not the end of the world, it is unclear at this point in time what you permit Nvidia to do with it by accepting the terms of service of the application.

Nvidia notes that customers benefit from account registration as well as it plans to give away free game codes, beta access to games, hardware and other "cool stuff".

Now You: Would you sign up to receive the latest Game-Ready drivers?