NVIDIA GeForce Experience 3.9.0.61

[DrinkLyeAndDie]

Today NVIDIA released updates for both the GeForce drivers (385.41 WHQL) and the GeForce Experience (3.9.0.61) software. To those who don't always read release notes carefully or at all the new GFE update removes the NVIDIA systray icon. I missed that point in the release notes and wasted some time figuring out what was going on.

GeForce Experience 3.9.0 Release Highlights

GeForce Experience Client:

• Added a feature to clean up previous driver downloads during new driver installation.
• Removed NVIDIA Tray Icon from Windows system tray in order to reduce the system footprint of NVIDIA software.
• Added feature to follow nFans WeChat club for China Region.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that would re-enable the GeForce Experience overlay after exiting certain games.
• Fixed a bug that prevented saving ShadowPlay Highlights to another hard drive.
• Various performance and stability improvements.
• Fixed bug to install GeForce Experience with a non-admin Windows user account.

 

[David_B]

Thanks for sharing. I actually like the NVIDIA Tray Icon. I'm going to miss it. I appreciate the fact that it helps reduce resource usage though.

 

[BrianG61UK]

At least it's obvious what program has failed to put up it's tray icon.
It's nothing compared to the trouble Geforce Experience 3.8.0.89 caused me.
A continuous stream of data (several kb/s) in and out over my internet connection leading me to waste hours and hours looking for a virus or trojan and the mysterious disabling of the timeout I had where my screen switched off automatically after 5 minutes of me not touching the keyboard or mouse, again hours spent tracking down which program was causing it. Then when I figured it out no way to stay on the previous GFE version -- the eff'ing thing just updates itself back to the latest version. Grrrr.

 

[Ch3vr0n]

tbh that's just a stupid move. If you want to find out for new driver' you'll now likely need to check manually. At least they should give the option to keep it active or not

 

[David_B]

tbh that's just a stupid move. If you want to find out for new driver' you'll now likely need to check manually. At least they should give the option to keep it active or not

Well they may still throw the pop-up like before, there's no tray icon to go along with it. I didn't see any indication in the changelog that the pop-up functionality no longer existed, unless I missed it.

 

[DrinkLyeAndDie]

In all honesty, I both understand and yet don't understand the logic. They could have made a systray icon optional similar to the systray icon you can enable from the NVIDIA Control Panel. At the end of the day, however, this won't negatively impact me. I was just stumped as to what was going on and why suddenly I was missing the icon.

Desktop notification options for available rewards and driver updates are still there in GFE. So, you'll get a notification if the check is enabled which it is by default. If you want to manually check then run GFE > Drivers > Check for updates. I usually know that an update is available before GFE ever notified me, anyway. I prefer to download and install the drivers on my own so I always disabled the check.

 

[BrianG61UK]

On the subject of manually installing NVIDIA driver updates.
Why does NVIDIA think it's acceptable to extract the installer to a temporary location that's different for each version under the C:\NVIDIA directory and just leave them there for ever?

For people who don't know, once the drivers are installed you can just delete the whole C:\NVIDIA directory. None of it needs to stay there at all.

 

[DrinkLyeAndDie]

On the subject of manually installing NVIDIA driver updates.
Why does NVIDIA think it's acceptable to extract the installer to a temporary location that's different for each version under the C:\NVIDIA directory and just leave them there for ever?

Agreed. I've wondered the same thing myself. Personally, I always keep the current and previously installed driver version decompressed in case I have to revert back or whatever. Saves a small amount of time and I have enough HDD space. That said, each driver install is ~1 GB of files when decompressed and that definitely adds up over time if it is never removed. At the very least you'd think NVIDIA could add a clean-up option to the installer or decompress to a temp directory and do it automatically.

For people who don't know, once the drivers are installed you can just delete the whole C:\NVIDIA directory. None of it needs to stay there at all.

Somewhere along the way CCleaner added handling that. It's probably been there for some time but I never noticed.

 

[shoek]

Someone found a way to get the tray icon back using files from an older driver version: