you forgot game capture/streaming and automatic game setting optimization

anything he cares about. Windows has built in game capture, and I know how to adjust settings on my games myself.

The "experience" app is just superfluous bullshit.

windows has automatic driver updates too so... why not just skip it alltogether

The drivers Windows uses are a fair bit older. Occasionally you really do need the latest drivers for a game

I use GameDVR (agario can take the framerate hit). GameDVR has a bug where Windows won't draw menus until I unplug and replug the monitor after using it (sometimes), so I did try Nvidia's thing. That recorded the start page for agario and my mouse. It was super interesting to watch, but not what I wanted. Maybe it works better for "real" games.

Anyway, everything is shit ;)

I use OBS with the NVEC codec - the one that is installed with the NVIDIA driver, and if you are recording anything, regardless of 3D or 2D, it is your best bet.

It's especially nice compared to normal H.264, and has the option of light compression with nominal CPU usage if you don't like large lossless files. It outputs normal MP4/H.264 files that I can then work with in Linux (as opposed to say Fraps) but uses the fact your GPU is already rendering the scene to then output it in H.264.

Thanks for the recommendation. I used simplescreenrecorder on Linux before, it worked pretty well. I'll try OBS on Windows and see how that goes.