Message to nVidia over Witcher 3

[Luridis]

 

I'm going to remove GeForce Experience and your company should know why. The reason is fairly simple: I cannot trust nVidia to optimize in MY best interests, only its own.

 

After recently purchasing The Wither 3, I was concerned as to whether or not my GeForce 660 SLI could handle the game at 1960x1080 at decent quality at decent frame rates. To my own surprise it handed the game on the game's suggested "medium" default at a consistent 47-60 FPS. Then I downloaded your recommended settings...

 

After updating the driver and "Experience" I find your "optimal" suggestions to all be "off" or "lowest". Those settings create a disturbingly low quality rendering. And, those suggestions are pretty shocking considering my hardware seems to be able to handle more without issue. This lead me to thinking, "why would nVidia suggest lower than my hardware can handle?"

 

The simple answer is that MARKETING people and/or managers are making the decisions behind optimizations instead of TECHNICAL people. I cannot trust GeForce Experience with game optimization because the people calling the shots are more interested in a deliberate sabotage of my image quality to sell me another video card than actually optimizing for the hardware I already own. Regardless of the capability of my 660 SLI, your application sets image quality lowest in the hopes that this will somehow motivate me to make newer purchase. It seems to me that nVidia is more interested in padding its stock price than supporting its loyal customers. This behavior is sociopathic at its heart and, now that I see GeForce "Experience" is little more than a marketing tool, I'll be removing the P.o.S. software from my system.

 

I'll do my own optimizations thanks... And I'll buy a new video card when I am damn good and ready, and not before. Perhaps I'll venture over to the AMD side next time...

 

 

Do you think that is too harsh?

[Orogun01]

Probably borne out of anger but as there are few free industries left you cannot escape duopolies and you can only choose on which end you get shafted on.

[Luridis]

Probably borne out of anger but as there are few free industries left you cannot escape duopolies and you can only choose on which end you get shafted on.

 

The right thing to do would have been to optimize genuinely, but suggest that the game would look much better with a newer card. In my opinion, their "optimal settings" are a malicious hamstring of quality to motivate a newer purchase. They don't care what it can do, only about what they can incite me to do by presenting me with the worst possible scenario.

Edited May 20, 2015 by Luridis

[Gorgon]

Why would you care about a service like that. More bloat for the taskbar ?, I've got enough. 

[Gorgon]

Does it come with the driver, can you remove it easily, these are questions which might steer me away from future Nvida purchases.

[Luridis]

Here, Picasa is doing some deliberate downsizing that I can't prevent. But you can at least see that the shadows aren't off, etc. My 660 SLI is running this at an average of 55 FPS.

 

 

 

[Luridis]

Does it come with the driver, can you remove it easily, these are questions which might steer me away from future Nvida purchases.

 

I installed it because it has free fraps functionality.

[mkreku]

Yeah, that's the reason I'm letting AMD's equivalent, Raptr, stay on my computer too: screenshots and the fact that it always keeps like 1 hour of replays in memory (which is kind of cool, I think).

[Zoraptor]

Do you think that is too harsh?

 

 

Nope. It's blunt/ in internet snarkese and would likely get put in the circular file but in essence I'd say it's accurate- it's a marketing tool aimed primarily at selling more cards rather than offering added value to the consumer. nVidia or AMD would of course happily sell you a new card every week if they could get away with it, they're in competition with each other and so long as that continues there probably won't be what they'd really like (ie licensing cards rather than selling them) but until then for them a customer who is not in the market to buy a new card or at very least not providing them with user data (also valuable, people would be amazed at what companies think is relevant and essential to collect) is not a customer any more.

 

Those programs seem to bo designed primarily around the 'vaguely baffled, pretty lazy' user who is the youth equivalent of the 'old fuddled user' to whom it is depressingly easy to sell service plans and the like which make life easier. I blame steam/ facebook with their Clippyesque 'let me help you with that!' attitude for it all. Then again, I blame steam/ facebook for global warming climate change and having three mismatched single socks in my sock drawer.

[Bokishi]

I delete that Nvidia GE stuff too; I already know what my card is capable of, I don't need software telling me what to run things as. Witcher 3 is the official GTX 970 showcase game, and runs great on mine with everything ultra. I get some lag when I zoom into Geralts hair physics though...

[teknoman2]

Yeah, that's the reason I'm letting AMD's equivalent, Raptr, stay on my computer too: screenshots and the fact that it always keeps like 1 hour of replays in memory (which is kind of cool, I think).

same here. a free recording tool for gameplay videos and with adjustable video quality 

btw i dont use the optimizations because they do the oposite of what nvidia does in most cases.

Edited May 20, 2015 by teknoman2

[Lexx]

NVidia Experience thingy is doing this to my games since the day it got released. Always thought this is because the tool isn't exactly good at detecting the hardware and performance of my computer and in worst case, it goes for the worse graphic in favour of fps. It probably doesn't know that you are happy with your jumping fps rate.

 

In any case, nobody is forcing you to press the optimisation-button. I simply ignore it and do it all by myself inside the game.

[Monte Carlo]

The only game I ever optimized using the Nvidia app thingie was Diablo 3 and it worked pretty well. But, yeah, I like tweaking in-game video options too.

 

I'm running a GTX670 btw.

[Orogun01]

I don't know man, I'm using GeoForce and told it to optimize for quality instead of performance. It set everything to Ultra, maybe is the RAM in your case and not the Video Card.

[mkreku]

Well.. when I first start up a game I let Raptr decide the settings for it. It's not AMD that decides the settings, it's all the users with the same hardware as I have that decides the settings. It creeps on every connected R9 290X owner and checks what they set the game to and probably does some sort of average from that. If the game is very new it usually just says that it hasn't yet gathered enough data for any settings suggestions.

 

It actually works pretty well. The only things I usually change are turning off blur effects/bloom/chromatic aberration and stuff like that (personal preferences).

[Fighter]

There isn't an automatic "recommended settings" function that has ever gotten it right for me. I always tweak if I use it at all.

[mkreku]

Raptr just set everything except shadows to Ultra for me and my R9 290X and I'm perfectly fine with that

[Gorgon]

Runs fine on my aged HD 7950 with a few compromises. 

[Humanoid]

An indirect benefit of rebadging old cards under new names, the HD7950 is still effectively a current card. Meanwhile Kepler is all but abandoned as it's no longer sold.

[Sanquiz]