Nvidia had quietly taken 40GB of my C: drive for a feature that barely mattered at all

There’s nothing more fascinating to me than seeing a familiar utility’s name pop up on my WizTree every time I decide to audit my SSD and see what’s taking up my increasingly expensive M.2 NVMe storage. It has become something of a ritual, and it usually ends with me deleting something Windows put there without asking as it always does.

So this time, I went in expecting more Windows 11 process bloat. What I found instead, however, was Nvidia, and a folder called DXCache, holding 40 gigabytes across 946 files for a purpose that wasn’t immediately clear. For context, my entire graphics driver install takes up less than a single gigabyte. Perhaps this folder was doing something it was designed to do, but I couldn’t remember ever agreeing to let it get this big.

The 40GB had nothing to do with my graphics driver

It sat in a folder that the driver installer never touches

DXCache is where Nvidia…