Nvidia wants to coordinate operations related to its drivers through the platform GeForce Experience. However, many users despise it for its performance and stability issues, the requirement of a login and other details such as telemetry. The good news is that GeForce Experience is not mandatory. The bad news is that we lose some interesting functions like new driver alerts. If you want to continue receiving notifications for updating Nvidia drivers, you might want to try the new program EnvyUpdate.
At the time of writing, the latest driver available for Nvidia graphics cards is the GeForce Game Ready in version 466.27, or 462.31 under the Nvidia Studio variant. If you have a GTX 500 series GPU or older, you will be forced to download an older driver, as its support under Windows concluded in 2018. But the story goes beyond drivers, and today we can say that they behave almost as if they were independent operating systems.
GeForce Experience is a striking example. That module allows us to capture images, record videos, stream, apply special optimizations for certain games, access overclocking, and automatically obtain the latest compatible drivers. This last feature is very interesting, but there is a drawback: Many users feel that GeForce Experience is bloatware. Using GE is not mandatory, but how do we get the best of both worlds? The answer is EnvyUpdate.
EnvyUpdate: Notifications for Updating Nvidia Drivers
All this small program does is check the latest driver version available on Nvidia's site, and compare it with the installed version. EnvyUpdate includes two modifiers, one for laptop drivers, and another for DCH editions (Declarative Componentized Hardware). If it's a desktop system, most likely both boxes will be unchecked. On the other hand, if you want a more permanent execution of EnvyUpdate, first you should check the Install box, and then place a checkmark in Autostart. That will make EnvyUpdate start with the computer in the system tray.
EnvyUpdate is an open source project and will surely receive frequent updates, but it has some limitations you should consider. The first is that it doesn't know how to differentiate between Game Ready and Nvidia Studio drivers: The Studio version has a lower number than Game Ready, and that causes an erroneous report. The second is a potential SmartScreen alert, because the executable is not signed. It's a false positive, as are the two reported by VirusTotal.
Finally, remember that you can install Nvidia drivers without the bloatware using NVCleanstall and turn EnvyUpdate into an excellent complement.
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