

If a driver update causes a problem, you can head to this folder to reinstall the previous driver update. We can imagine what these are for, however. RELATED: How to Recover From a Bad GPU Driver Update We reached out to NVIDIA to ask why GeForce Experience stores copies of all these installers in a folder like this, but NVIDIA didn’t respond. This should only be needed during the driver installation process, and you’ll only need it again if you ever need to reinstall the latest driver. The “latest” folder stores an uncompressed copy of the latest driver update. Even after the driver is successfully installed, the installers are left here. exe form.īasically, whenever NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software downloads a driver update, it stores a full copy of that update’s installer here. Double-click one of these folders, and you’ll see exactly what’s inside: NVIDIA driver updates in. If you open the Downloader folder, you’ll see a number of folders with random-looking names. We’re not sure if NVIDIA’s software ever deletes them. If you haven’t reinstalled Windows or deleted these files in a while, they may still be stored in these folders. Previous versions of the NVIDIA software stored these driver installation files at C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Installer2, C:\ProgramData\NVIDIA Corporation\NetService, and just under the C:\NVIDIA folder. We’ve seen this folder balloon much larger in the past.

However, that’s just because we cleared these files out a few months ago. In the screenshot below, these files are only using 1.4 GB of space on our test system.

To see exactly how much space these files are using on your PC, open the NVIDIA Corporation directory here, right-click the “Downloader” folder, and select “Properties”.

That’s why NVIDIA stores these files on your hard drive. NVIDIA also said they plan to add a “Revert to prior driver” feature in a future version of GeForce Experience. NVIDIA now only keeps installers for the current and previous version of the driver, which will be about 1 GB in total. In GeForce Experience 3.9.0, NVIDIA added a cleanup tool that will automatically remove old driver versions. Update: NVIDIA reached out to us with some new information. And you’ll probably only notice it if you use a disk space analysis tool. I’ve seen these files use over 4 GB of space, and, while that may sound like a small amount of space to some, it’s a lot of wasted space on a smaller SSD. NVIDIA leaves old installer files buried on your hard drive until you get annoyed and manually delete them…if you even realize you need to.Īs someone who’s used NVIDIA graphics hardware for years, this has been annoying me for a very long time. If you’re a gamer (or just a PC user) with NVIDIA graphics, NVIDIA’s drivers are probably wasting gigabytes of storage on your hard drive.
