Unfortunately the installer destroyed my NVidia display driver (replaced it with something which is not compatible with my Windows 10 PC). I was very disappointed because I was expecting something much better from NVidia. But after some investigation I have downloaded a new driver, installed it and then everything was OK (I however lost several GB’s of SSD space on my Windows drive).
I think you better tell your team who is responsible for this that this problem should be investigated and avoided at all costs. I would advice you to completely remove the display driver installation from the package and let the user know to install the last version of the display driver manually. The download will also be at least 0.5 GB less I think.
Furthermore, there are already for several years problems with NVidia installation files which unnecessarily use up a lot of HD space. Nowadays with small SSD Windows drives this is a disaster. I do not understand why NVidia does not do anything to solve this problem. I have found 10 NVidia display drivers on my system and several temporary installation directories with several GB’s of data on several places. Old drivers are not being uninstalled and it is not that easy to remove them from the driverstore.
Thank you for your advice njuffa. I am not going to file a bug report because this is more than just a bug, I find it unacceptable that a company which makes such very good hardware keeps this low quality of installation practice.
I have also not found any information in the distributed 2.1 GB (compressed) about how to distribute the software I make with it, what are the necessary DLL’s, etc. I have the feeling that installation/distribution is not important for NVidia while it is one of the most important things because if you do not do that well your product becomes useless and you loose all the work you have done! Furthermore, they are annoying millions of people with the installation clutter already for several years. Hopefully NVidia reads this message board and will think about these things and increase the quality of installations.
For many years (around 10 or so), CUDA installations have provided the option not to touch the currently installed display driver when installing CUDA. Did you make use of that option?
The reason the CUDA installation procedure install a matching driver by default is because in the distant past, when that wasn’t the case, many customers complained that their freshly installed CUDA didn’t work, since they had outdated drivers installed that did not support the new CUDA version.
I have installed CUDA on Windows and Linux platforms numerous time (run file for the latter) in the past twelve years and never really encountered any issues as far as official releases were concerned.
Generally speaking, these forums are designed as a platform for users helping users, not as an NVIDIA customer support venue. As a developer, the one effective way to contact NVIDIA is to file bug reports for functional issues and requests for enhancement for other issues (performance, documentation, etc).
You are welcome to vent frustrations here. Just be aware that this is only slightly more effective than sending such content to /dev/null.
Thanks for your comment. I was advised by an NVidia employee to put this message here, therefore I think that they may read this more than you think. Let us hope!
Concerning your remark about the installation of the driver. I must say that it is a wrong strategy. Of course I have installed it because I thought that without it it will not work. Therefore what they have to do is to check the existing driver on the system and compare the type and version number and only install it if it is OK to install. And it would be even better to make the installation optional (OFF as default) and then the setup can be run again to add it if needed.
Anyway, I think that NVidia has enough info to think about this issue and I will not make this longer. Thank you for your contribution.