Tuesday, September 12th 2017
Tiny App Checks NVIDIA Driver Updates
A tiny open-source app named simply "TinyNvidiaUpdateChecker" by "ElPumpo" could make GeForce Experience look bulky and redundant, if all you use it for is keep up with driver updates. With practically each new AAA game release, NVIDIA and AMD tend to put out graphics driver updates. Among several useful features such as optimizing your game settings or making them portable, the GeForce Experience app keeps your GeForce drivers up to date. On the downside, it has drawn criticism over its user privacy, the need to register as a user and log-on at each system startup; and for its unnecessarily big memory footprint as the app keeps running in the background.
The open-source app, along with its source-code and a pre-compiled binary, are available on GitHub. It's a little rough on the edges, but could be worth it for its tiny memory footprint. On the flip-side, this app doesn't run on in the background, and you have to manually run it to look up updates, something you might as well look up online in your browser. The API that makes this app work could be pulled by NVIDIA any time, as it looks to promote GeForce Experience. Alternatively, you can subscribe to E-Mail notifications by TechPowerUp by clicking on the "Get Notified" button in our download pages, for your favorite driver updates. We're completely web-based and you won't need to trust apps to look up your driver updates.
DOWNLOAD: TinyNvidiaUpdateChecker by ElPumpo
The open-source app, along with its source-code and a pre-compiled binary, are available on GitHub. It's a little rough on the edges, but could be worth it for its tiny memory footprint. On the flip-side, this app doesn't run on in the background, and you have to manually run it to look up updates, something you might as well look up online in your browser. The API that makes this app work could be pulled by NVIDIA any time, as it looks to promote GeForce Experience. Alternatively, you can subscribe to E-Mail notifications by TechPowerUp by clicking on the "Get Notified" button in our download pages, for your favorite driver updates. We're completely web-based and you won't need to trust apps to look up your driver updates.
41 Comments on Tiny App Checks NVIDIA Driver Updates
I feel it needs a command to automatically add some kind of scheduled tasks that runs the program in quiet mode. Or, better yet, a simple GUI even though this seems to be a dirty word for many developers.
If you have a new game title you'll wait for the game ready driver anyway, if you don't, there is zero reason to even care bout it, when you run into an issue, you go look up a new driver as well.
This has even less functionality and use as GFE itself
*edit: language
I did note that I can use Nvidia's Ansel without GFE, which is nice. Its a cool feature
Edit: Beaten to the punch...
The trigger for updating always makes you go check for the update manually anyway. If you want every driver release, and early adopt all of Nvidia's recent fuckups, be my guest, but you're not helping anything with that :D
Honestly these 'useful apps' fall into the category of those parents that have planted every bit of Windows tweaking and nonsensical scanning app because the ad somewhere says it was super useful. Right now we have these conscious gamer tin foil hats that believe every bit of telemetry needs to be banished, so they install a bigger heap of bloatware and Windows tweaking apps to avoid it.
In all fairness, all of it is a massive waste of time and guaranteed to crash and burn sometime in the future as a new update or change comes around. A solid PC is supposed to save you time, not make you invest more to do the things you actually wanted to do. Maintenance it seems for some people has become a goal in itself. Weird.
Junk is junk.
If it actually influences performance to me does not matter, I dont want it.
I sometimes run GF Experience for the lols, and update sometimes or not.
The whole story is trivial. Just game along ;)
but I guess people don't want it, and neither wants to go into nvidia.com to check.
I'm glad I'm in Linux and have repositories that sort everything out :D
My stance on drivers is that I only update when there's a problem, a game needs it, it's been months since my last update (only for GPU drivers), or there's a new feature I want or need. I always skim the release notes and check forum posts to make sure no one has had crazy issues.
Also, I know it does this for video drivers, but I'm not sure about any other drivers. I would assume it updates them, too, but I've never bothered to check.
1. I have disabled option to download updated drivers from Windows Update
2. I have disabled Windows Update completely and use WU Minitool instead.
:-)