The latest version of Nvidia's drivers for Windows takes up more than half a gigabyte. Basically, they behave like an operating system installed inside another operating system. It would be great if the company offered 'lite' editions (for example, without telemetry or GeForce Experience) and let us customize the whole process without hiding modules. In other words, we'd love to know how to remove Nvidia driver bloatware, but until an official answer appears, we can use the new NVSlimmer.
520 megabytes. That's what the installer of version 411.70 of the Nvidia driver for Windows 10 64-bit takes up. There are Linux distros much smaller than that, and an unpatched ISO image of old Windows XP SP3 floats around 600 megabytes. We're supposed to accept that graphics cards have become very complex and powerful, and that they need gigantic drivers. Fortunately, gaming enthusiasts love to challenge official positions, and over time they've discovered how to remove Nvidia driver bloatware by modifying some .cfg files and deleting folders. The manual process is effective but tedious, and user uKER from the Guru3D forums decided to automate it a bit. The result is NVSlimmer.
How to remove Nvidia driver bloatware with NVSlimmer
NVSlimmer is in a relatively early stage of development, and users haven't hesitated to report problems under more exotic configurations, but its basic functionality is impeccable. The idea is that everything not checked in NVSlimmer's interface will be removed from the driver, while modules considered "critical" are already pre-selected. There are three in total: Core Display Driver, Install Core, and PhysX. HD Audio is recommended if you use audio over HDMI, and the rest of the dependencies are still a work in progress, but we already have a pretty solid idea of the close relationship between some modules.
Once the purge of the drivers is complete, we can proceed to install them formally, or do a repackaging, which will create an extractable .exe. In the specific case of driver 411.70, by choosing the three essential modules and HD Audio, the reduction in the installation pack was 144 megabytes, but most importantly, the bloatware won't remain on our system. As always, any operation involving modified drivers should be considered experimental. There's no support here beyond asking on the Guru3D forums, and if something goes wrong, you're on your own. Finally, remember that bloatware isn't exclusive to drivers. You also need to remove it from new computers, and of course, from Windows 10.
