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possiblylinux127

Are NVIDIA proprietary drivers spyware? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/linuxquestions

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I was planning on upgrading to a NVIDIA GPU because of its superior ray-tracing capabilities. In general I don't trust proprietary software and the only proprietary applications I use reguraly are Steam and MakeMKV. Even being closed source, wouldn't we be able to tell if the NVIDIA drivers and/or software was collecting telemetry and phoning home? Are there any other concerns beyond that? Sorry if this is a dumb question.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Huh. I've seen the RT lighting too, in Cyberpunk, and wasn't impressed. But then, I was only using a 3070 (on a Ryzen 7 3700X with 32GB of DDR-3400 RAM), and gaming at 2k, and the performance hit was massive even with DLSS on. I was getting >60fps consistently with RT off. I've noticed weird visual artefacts with RT too. Just seemed underbaked, to me, but that was a few years ago now and as you might have noted my hardware aging even then. I'd say aging well, but still maybe underpowered for what I was trying to do with it.

By "the app" I mean "the nVidia app". Collecting telemetry data is one of the stated goals of that software. I don't know what it collects, but it's well-established it sends computer use data back to nVidia. Same with Windows; you have to actively opt out of the telemetry every update (shout-out to O&O Software for their "shut up 10" and "shut up 11" software!)