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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

> No idea what data Nvidia connects but this sounds even more shady.

It gets worse - if you're on Windows and your driver was not installed by an OEM (if it didn't come with the computer, or you reinstalled the OS or something), GeForce Experience wants you to connect to the internet and sign into an Nvidia account to access some features of the graphics card, like ShadowPlay.

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But thankfully GeForce Experience experience is totally optional, you can just select not to install when you install the driver

Honestly it doesn't even have any critical feature https://www.nvidia.com/en-eu/geforce/geforce-experience/

Then you will not be able to access some of the features that is advertised for the hardware you bought (like shadowplay).

Doesn't this at least make some sense? ShadowPlay is literally for recording and sharing video.

If you don't want Nvidia to record you... It sounds like you don't want shadowplay either.

>Doesn't this at least make some sense?

No, it doesn't make sense. Why do you need an internet connection in order for your graphics card to record video? Even if it's inherently networked, NASes exist and don't need Nvidia's servers.

ShadowPlay is not just for uploading recordings to the cloud. ShadowPlay also allows you to capture the output of your GPU without having to insert an external capture card in between. It essentially uses NVENC to generate a video stream before it even leaves the graphics card, so the CPU doesn't have to do nearly as much work.

You are equivocating with the use of “record” in two different senses if that word. A person may very reasonably accept one of them without the other.

You can still use alternate front-ends to "shadowplay" like OBS replay buffer.

One of the huge sells of ShadowPlay is that it doesn't place extra burden on Windows to capture the screen every frame, instead it directly captures the actual framebuffer (and encodes the frames) directly on the GPU, without having to switch or bottleneck any rendering code paths. It wouldn't surprise me if people who swear by ShadowPlay can tell the performance difference compared to software screen capture.

Basically it aims to replace the need to for an additional out-of-band capture card (those can get very expensive, especially if you want 4k60).

I don't think you're going to be running into much performance difference between the two. People say GameCapture already grabs the frame buffer, but I can't say whether that's true or not.

Most likely, different framebuffer - ShadowPlay grabs the exact frames sent to the physical monitor while GameCapture intercepts it in software (most likely anyway, if it doesn't use the Nvidia-specific APIs that ShadowPlay does). The former doesn't require inserting any extra steps into the rendering pipeline, so it's generally faster (sometimes by a lot).

Well, for some features you might be able to. Based on around 20 seconds of googling it seems like GeForce Experience has some flags that'll start some things up directly (this may be how they're managed by the interface, I'm not sure). This should include shadowplay if you pass it the `-shadowplay` flag.

It's a bit worrying that it already requires this though, the whole thing is as close as it can be to DRM without obviously being DRM. And Nvidia is known to DRM their GPUs a lot.

While you can't use ShadowPlay you can use Nvidia's hardware encoding with software like OBS to do the same thing as ShadowPlay. Actually, it's even better because you can configure OBS to only do it in RAM.

A good portion of the overhead that ShadowPlay addresses is actually video capture, not just encoding/compression - but IME it's true that even NVENC on its own can take a good load off the CPU.

Absolutely, I think I have it installed, but it's intentionally one major version behind (GeForce Experience 2 instead of 3) so it won't make me log in, and that works well enough when I certainly don't let it run in the background, I only boot it up for certain buttons it has. I don't remember which ones - I haven't touched it in months, so they must not be that important anyway.

Edit: Apparently the GeForce Experience that showed up in my search was actually the one that came in the driver support package for my laptop (which I no longer use), I may have never even used it on this computer at all.

No Shadowplay, no Gamestream (so, if you bought an Nvidia Shield for that, you're screwed. No, Sunshine isn't currently at feature parity with Gamestream), no automatic driver updates (which, in this day and age, are quite important for newer games), no Ansel.

Nothing critical no, but all things that, if you don't have and need, have no real alternative.

I just wait til I run across a game that refuses to start due to old drivers before I bother to update them. Works pretty well as a notification system for me.

Surely you can just firewall off Nvidia's telemetry servers.

It's a bit hard to log into an Nvidia account without connecting to their servers. But I guess if you're not philosophically opposed to online logins, you could totally just log in and then block its internet access with a firewall rule (either Windows Defender Firewall, or another app like Portmaster).

I do this anyway even though I don't have GFE installed because other components of the driver also try to connect to Nvidia's servers for some reason. Not on my watch.

(Though I wonder if there is some registry key or something to make GFE believe you've logged in, even if it's never connected to the internet. Surely someone would've figured it out by now.)

Why do you have to login to enable video recording functionality?

I don't know. The app won't let you past a login screen, so you can't use any of the settings. Luckily the Nvidia Control Panel that comes with the driver is devoid of any obstacles whatsoever, but it seems that at least the ShadowPlay implementation happens to live with GeForce Experience.

Weird, seems like someone would have hacked a workaround as you say.

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