Games

You don't need to update your drivers every time a new version comes out, some games can actually get worse performance with a newer driver - I personally had problems with No Man's Sky, nvidia drivers over version 424 I think, made the game effectively unplayable, while versions like 416 kept the game and the framerate smooth throughout.

You can download them manually if you want. Updated drivers is rarely that important for performance. Maybe for newer games, but not for 98% of what's already out there.

And they also mess things up occasionally. Like all those Minecraft performance mods that had to change how the game looked to the driver, because if it looked like Minecraft it'd tune itself and get worse performance instead of better.

A driver allows games to interface with the graphics hardware, enabling accelerated performance for example. This “app” provides additional functionality on top of that (I don’t know what, but GeForce Experience it replaces provided things like recording gameplay videos etc.) which is not strictly required and, it seems, hurts gaming performance.

As for getting the latest drivers, you can do it manually by going to nVidia’s website and download them, or rely on Windows update to give you reasonably recent drivers.

Some years ago, when I was still using windows, I used to run https://www.techpowerup.com/nvcleanstall/ instead to update drivers. Still recommend it to this day.

Another issue linux gamers don't have nowdays