On that same note, does installing the latest Nvidia drivers impact battery life? Should I have stuck with what MS updates only? If so, how would I go back to MS drivers? Do I have to start clean or is there a way to remove the latest drivers that Nvidia provides? I won't do anything if someone tells me there is no hit to battery life.
Nvidia drivers
- Thread starter gman713
- Start date
I've installed them and haven't seen any negative impact to battery life...
starcrusader
New Member
I just used GeForce Experience, and let it install the correct drivers. Seemed to work fine.
wynand32
Well-Known Member
One question I have about using the Nvidia drivers is the impact on the power slider settings. Do the three settings still work or does that slider then only control the CPU?
That's a good question. After MS patched the other day, I retested performance using better performance and best performance and did not see any difference. I did the test after I lost about 3% of my overall performance due to the patch.
wynand32
Well-Known Member
If you could do a test on Recommended as well, that would be helpful. That would tell us if there's a way to ramp down performance in the event someone doesn't want to hit the battery due to the power supply issue.
I think the power supply concern isn't a big deal. I was playing the Witcher 3 on the Best Performance setting and my battery only dropped 2% over an hour of playing.
wynand32
Well-Known Member
This was with the Nvidia drivers installed?
Generally, I'm torn on whether this power supply thing is a big deal. On the one hand, you're correct, you really need to burn the CPU and GPU to discharge the battery. It's not just gaming -- I've seen it when encoding video using Adobe Premier Pro and accesing the GTX 1060 (oddly enough, when apparently Premier Pro won't use the dGPU for other video editing tasks). But I can't say it uses a ton of battery life in such instances because I simply haven't tested it that long.
On the other hand, what concerns me most is that discharging the battery even slightly means extra charge cycles over the long term and a shorter battery lifespan. Someone who is constantly churning through tasks the cause discharge is going to see their battery die much sooner.
Yes, as a matter of fact I just updated my drivers yesterday. Honestly, if you set it at better and not best performance, you won't see any discharge and I really can't tell the difference in performance. Even my benchmarks don't show any difference.
wynand32
Well-Known Member
So, a quick (maybe) question: if one installs the Nvidia and Intel drivers, how hard is it to roll back to using the Microsoft-issued drivers?
Not hard pretty standard - occasionally you'll need to remove the device and uninstall the driver and reboot.
Does anyone notice after installing the GeForce Experience application that you start getting a "Surface Detach: Action Required" message in the system tray? I just installed it (again) and after a reboot, this message appeared. Before installing the application, I never had this message.
