Nvidia extended product support subscription

[moonbogg]

Who doesn't see this coming? Its a great idea to be honest. You buy a GPU and they offer driver support for the latest games so long as that product family is still current. Once its replaced, driver focus moves to the new product family and your products performance will predictably start to suffer badly with new titles. Driver support is expensive and its not fair to Nvidia to expect them to allocate cutting edge resources for your not so cutting edge graphics card. They should focus on where their profits are, and that is mainly the current product generation.
The solution is a subscription. You pay annually for extended driver support or you can purchase a driver package as a stand alone software product. Those who pay will get cutting edge driver support for their products for another entire generation. The difference between those who pay and those who don't can be as high as a 50% performance delta.
The drivers are only available to those who pay and you login with your subscription activated account to download the new drivers or get them through Geforce Experience. You can't share them with those who can't pay because they only work on PC's with recognized hardware ID's which are owned by someone with a subscription.
I think Nvidia has been priming the pump for this by letting Kepler fail so hard. The simply can't afford to allocate the resources, but if you pay them more money, then that can all change...
Profit. Discuss.

 

[NTMBK]

Jesus, you're really flogging this dead horse for all its worth.

Yes, driver support is expensive. You need a massive team of high quality software engineers, and that isn't cheap. Why do you think people pay so much to get Quadro cards?

 

[moonbogg]

Jesus, you're really flogging this dead horse for all its worth.

Yes, driver support is expensive. You need a massive team of high quality software engineers, and that isn't cheap. Why do you think people pay so much to get Quadro cards?

Exactly. At first the idea sound like idiocy, but after thinking about it a second, it makes sense. This does make sense and might actually turn out to be a good thing for us.
If they charge us a reasonable subscription fee to pay the extreme overhead required to continue driver support for older products, then those older products will get much more love and care than ever before.
Quadros are expensive for the reason you stated. They HAVE to work with lots of different pro apps. If you want your gaming GPU to work with lots of games then maybe they should be charging us for that privilege.
Seriously, this has been something I enjoy joking about, but JUST NOW I realized it is a good idea. I would pay it. I would. I want more focus on driver support and I am willing to pay for that. It will let you get the most from your hardware for a longer period.
They can bundle it with current GPU's. Buy the GPU for $650.00 and add another $75.00 for extended driver support or premium driver support or something like that. You don't think its worth it to pay for better drivers for the life of the card and beyond its generation?

 

[NTMBK]

Meh, I would prefer to just buy midrange cards and replace them more often. Buying a Titan and then trying to eke 6 years out of it doesn't make a lot of sense. Plus it gives NVidia an incentive to make the "non-premium" drivers worse than they currently are, like how Geforce has deliberately poor OpenGL support.

 

[moonbogg]

I think it would work. If driver support becomes a dedicated source of revenue, then we are going to get much better driver support. Things like SLI will be taken more seriously. It will change things for the better. We just expect it all for free? years and years of EXPENSIVE ASS driver support just because we want it? For free? Nope. If that's what we expect then we will keep getting what we are getting. If you want the best then you have to offer incentive. You have to pay.
They experimented with the infrastructure when they locked drivers behind GeForce experience and required registration. That's everything in place, minus the billing.

 

[Mopetar]

What's to stop someone from pirating the good drivers that they didn't pay for?

Your plan isn't feasible unless you require some kind of phone home approach for updates, which only works itself until cracked and makes the GPU more complicated than it needs to be. The built-in upfront cost model works better.

 

[Elixer]

Exactly. At first the idea sound like idiocy, but after thinking about it a second, it makes sense. This does make sense and might actually turn out to be a good thing for us.
If they charge us a reasonable subscription fee to pay the extreme overhead required to continue driver support for older products, then those older products will get much more love and care than ever before.
Quadros are expensive for the reason you stated. They HAVE to work with lots of different pro apps. If you want your gaming GPU to work with lots of games then maybe they should be charging us for that privilege.
Seriously, this has been something I enjoy joking about, but JUST NOW I realized it is a good idea. I would pay it. I would. I want more focus on driver support and I am willing to pay for that. It will let you get the most from your hardware for a longer period.
They can bundle it with current GPU's. Buy the GPU for $650.00 and add another $75.00 for extended driver support or premium driver support or something like that. You don't think its worth it to pay for better drivers for the life of the card and beyond its generation?

It will never work at the consumer level.
Right now, the cost of the card that you pay already includes drivers.
If you want some kind of a pay model, then each card would have some kind of a hardware protection built in to prevent unauthorized people from using those drivers.
Paying for extra support means contracts, and that would have a huge impact of future hardware.

The problem here is, that most of the time the drivers aren't finished in time and they tend to be buggy.
The other problem is, twofold, one, new games expose issues in their drivers and they want (need) to fix, and two, they try to squeeze more performance from every new game, and that requires more work, which costs more.
So, they should concentrate on bug fixes first, and, as long as they are making $$$ then they can go back and optimize for each game they want.