Nvidia's GeForce Experience aims to streamline PC gaming

From CNET News.com: Nvidia wants its new GeForce Experience software to help gamers navigate the technical hurdles common to playing games on a computer. It's easy to see how it could become something more.

In closed beta as of today, the GeForce Experience presently offers two core functions. It can automate the process of updating your Nvidia graphics card software driver. It can also detect your system configuration and apply an optimal set of in-game graphics settings.

As any PC gamer can tell you, keeping your graphics card drivers current is a tedious necessity, but it's also one of the first suggestions for troubleshooting a problematic game. With Nvidia's and AMD's recent habit of releasing a new driver every time a major new game comes out, updating the driver has also become a more frequent activity.

In truth, automated driver updates is remarkable perhaps only because that functionality hasn't existed previously outside of Microsoft's own all-or-nothing Windows Update mechanism. The need to keep drivers current has long been a primary point of criticism when people complain about the complexity of PC gaming. The GeForce Experience software will still allow enthusiasts to micro manage their driver installations, and also download beta drivers, but for those less inclined to want to deal with that upkeep, the automate update process should come as a blessing.

And while optimizing in-game settings might not sound that exciting, if not redundant, Nvidia has put tremendous effort behind this process. I have not yet had hands-on time with the results of Nvidia's optimizations, but if it works as Nvidia has described, gamers should benefit, particularly non-enthusiasts.

It's also here where Nvidia has also planted some interesting seeds for the future.

The idea behind the settings optimizations, is that Nvidia wants to help gamers achieve the best possible gaming experience for a given PC configuration. Some games seem to offer a similar feature in their own settings menus, but Nvidia says its data-driven approach achieves better results.

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