NVSlimmer: remove unwanted components from Nvidia drivers

NVIDIA driver slimming utility (NVSlimmer) is a free portable program for Windows to remove unwanted components from Nvidia drivers before installation.

Nvidia graphics drivers have grown considerably in recent time thanks to the introduction of new features and components.

Current drivers install a lot of these components by default even if the PC system does not support certain features or when certain components are not used or wanted.

To name a few: GeForce Experience, Telemetry, ShadowPlay, 3D Vision, Optimus, or backend components required for certain features.

These components take up storage space on the system, may be loaded automatically, and may even submit Telemetry data to Nvidia automatically. There is also a chance that components may have vulnerabilities, like GeForce Experience’s node.js back in April 2017.

Administrators and users can do something about it. While it is certainly comfortable to just press install and be done with it, it is usually better to spend the extra minute to install only the Nvidia graphics drivers or at the very least block Telemetry from being installed or disable Nvidia Telemetry.

Remove unwanted components from Nvidia drivers

nvidia driver slimmer

NVSlimmer is a free portable program for Windows that gives you full control over the installation of Nvidia drivers.

Start the program after extraction on the local system and select the Nvidia driver that you want to install on the system. Note that you need to download drivers separately as the program does not support driver downloads at this point in time.

NVSlimmer analyzes the driver package and displays the detected components in the interface afterward. Only core components, the display driver and Physx are selected by default. All other components, e..g Telemetry, 3D Vision, GeForce Experience, or Nvidia Backend are not selected.

You can select components that you want to install on the system by checking them. Note that you can’t uncheck the core driver or component, but that all other components are optional.

The program does not check dependencies at this point in time which means that you may install components that rely on other components that are not installed. The developer plans to integrate dependencies in a future version so that required components get selected automatically when you check certain components.

It is easy enough to run the program again and select missing components.

Hit the apply button after you have made the selection to remove any component that you have not selected from the installation process. Select install in the interface to run the default Nvidia driver installer. The installer will install only the selected components and nothing more.

Select custom installation during setup to verify that; only the selected components should be displayed after you select custom installation.

You may use NVSlimmer to create a new installation package that includes only the components that you have selected. Useful for installation on multiple PCs or systems, or to keep the custom driver installation package in reach whenever you want to re-run it on the PC it was created on.

Closing Words

NVSlimmer is an easy to use program to create custom Nvidia driver installation packages and installations.

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