Same deal as win10, telemetry is active by default and there is no way to opt-out. The link below explains how to disable it, but I fully expect it to return the next time I upgrade my drivers.
Unclear if this is tied to Geforce Experience. If so, uninstalling that program may do the trick.
I still have GFE 2.x installed, and don’t have the telemetry options in question, so fairly sure that is what it is tied to (hence why GFE 3.x requires a login now).
Hadn’t used Autoruns before though - nice utility! Was able to disable quite a bit of other crap as well.
EDIT: Just realized I’m not on the latest drivers, so my assumption above is still untested.
Agreed, I’d also never heard of it, great stuff! Thanks!
Updated to the latest drivers. I still have no telemetry entries in Autoruns, nor do I have anything relating to the Wireless driver. In fact, I have no nVidia-based scheduled tasks at all. So, hooray for GFE 2.x (or running without GFE at all).
Re: Autoruns and SysInternals
Mark Russinovich is such an awesome guy for this stuff. I went to a talk of his at TechEd on getting down deep into Windows internals and couldn’t follow more than half of it. Dude is really smart and incredibly knowledgeable.
Yep, I’ve used autoruns for many years. Process Explorer is very useful also.
This is a pity, because I kinda like GFE. It provides a useful starting point for tuning game options. But if it’s going to spy on me, no sale.
Just get a good firewall and it will let you disable all the “spying” by not allowing the outbound connections.
Althought, modifing the JSON files is better, since you can disable it there as well (as the earlier linked task schedules + services).
Still it is a major low from Nvidia who used to have the ‘least bloated driver pack’ compared to ATI.
Another thing with GFE3.x and all the telemetry and whatever is that they are using nodeJS and all the “imported” functions are pretty well commented in the code, but Nvidias own stuff is hardly commented at all.
I suppose a good starting point is to block:
telemetry.gfe.nvidia.com
More fun is found in
%AppData%…\NVIDIA\NvBackend
I do have a firewall, but GFE needs to access the network for core functionality; downloading game thumbnails, optimized settings, and checking for new drivers. If blocking that single host works, that would be cool, but from this report there’s at least one other IP.
Well,
It connects to:
It goes to
With your system information to see if you are “eligible” to enable ShadowPlay etc.
Basically sends: GFE Version, DeviceID/Subsystem/VendorID; cpuID; Memory; Operating System Version; Beta Flag; Geforce Driver Version; languageID; 64-bit check; and some more.
Then it connects to
–
Then it connects again to
To check for driver updates even if you have it disabled…
Then it connects to
Blocking this makes the application take AGES to launch up, and your console.log file will be filled with error messages…
It also creates a “telemetry deviceID” which I suppose can be used to track you with.
Then there’s the whole “gallery”/Game optimization feature which I’ve ranted about earlier. Luckily it could be killed easily with two edits in nvGallery.js, by adding // in front of “api.GalleryEnumerateDrives(doReply);”
Sending all that stuff when the application is open is basically fine by me. It’s all relevant to the purpose of the program.
But when you close GFE, those services remain resident in the background silently sending telemetry. That’s not OK.
%appdata% …\Local\NVIDIA\NvBackend
Shim.xml contains more than what would be relevant for a graphics card.
anyway, the 3.x verison had so much crap in it that I stopped using it. Thinking I should just reinstall 2.x if I can find the installer files.
I have an older card (GTX 660 Ti) and haven’t updated my drivers in a while. I have ignored GFE and always cancel it when it notifies me of new drivers. When I update drivers, I just manually download and install them from Nvidia’s site.
Is the latest version of GFE automatically installed with the drivers, or is it a separate download?
Separate for now.
To clarify this for people who may not know, they allegedly had plans to make all video drivers available only through a logged-in GFE account, but when rumors surfaced they caught absolute hell.
Hmm… be careful. If you choose ‘Express’ install, I could have sworn GFE was included as part of that.
I’d think AMD would get a lot of new customers if they did that.
Agreed, 100%. I’d like to think the bean-counters at Nvidia are smarter than that.
Good point. I have an older version of GFE and would have never installed it separately, so it must have just installed along with the drivers last time. I usually am careful about choosing Custom Install and unchecking things I don’t want, but it was a new build and I may have just hit tweaking fatigue and installed everything.
I’m updating my nVidia driver’s right now. I always choose custom install and here are my choices for drivers: Graphic Driver, 3D vision Controller Driver, 3D Vision Driver, HD audio Driver, nVidia GeForce Experience and PhysX System Software. I’m only installing the graphic’s driver and physX software, don’t need the others. I suspect that if one chose express install you get all the above names drivers and software installed.
Always choose custom install for everything. Always.