this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2024
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Are NVIDIA proprietary drivers spyware? (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 days 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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[–] TheHobbyist 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

What exact GPU are you considering? While GPUs like the 3060/4060 technically support raytracing, they will not offer a sufficiently comfortable experience to make use of it. You'll definitely have to consider a more powerful GPU. So if you are in the market for a sub-500$ GPU, you can simply ignore raytracing. And that is even more true the higher up in resolution you go.

Here you can witness the drop in performance (on average about 30%) due to raytracing on high end cards, at high resolution with dlss/fsr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTeKzJsoL3k

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

I'm considering the NVIDIA RTX-4070 Super. I was impressed with it's performance in Cyberpunk 2077.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

Installing NVCC caused this on my whitelist logs:

Post from 3 months ago:

https://lemmy.world/post/18989867

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

The drivers, no. The app, yes. Windows, yes.

Can I ask why you want Ray Tracing at all? Is it just for gaming or do you have another specific application in mind? In my experience RT is not that much better than rasterised lighting, for games...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Depends on the game. Developers have become very good at using tricks to make rasterization look good and realistic, but they are still just tricks. Some games’ ray tracing look extremely good and have effects that would not be possible without it, though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

That's fair, it's an actively developing field and I have not been keeping up! I think I didn't have a good experience with it on my rig and mentally shelved it as something to think about when I have scads of cash to blow on frivolities since I didn't seem to see any improvement in Cyberpunk. But I'm perfectly willing to admit that my test was not scientific in any way shape or form - my rig simply chugged so it might have been impossible to appreciate any difference, with the stuttering.

Consider the case file open again, I'll give RT another chance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

To be honest, I only played Cyberpunk with full on ray tracing, but I watched many videos of games. It all looked very nice to me. But you do get used to what you're seeing as you get lost in the gameplay and it starts to matter less (than e.g framerate), and as I said, the rasterization techniques in modern games are awesome.

But, I come from a time where games like Doom, Quake and Unreal and so on were showcasing the latest technology in games in the '90s, and I've always been interested in generational technology leaps in 3D graphics since then. I mean, Doom was just really a 2D game using tricks to make it seem like it was 3D, and until Quake, there weren't any actual, fully textured, real 3D shooters around, I think (well, maybe Descent, and a few others?) I saw coloured lighting for the first time in Unreal. And so on.

Anyway, the knowledge that the lighting is actually accurate, seeing stuff reflected in windows, puddles, etc. that is actually there behind you instead of just screen-space reflections, having accurate global illumination with light bouncing off even the smallest objects on a table (see Alan Wake 2), stuff like that... I love that stuff, and it will only get better!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Sorry, but what app are you referring to? I care about RT for a few games. AMD's RT implementation does not work at all for Resident Evil 2 and 3 remake. I also want it for Cyberpunk 2077 and Silent Hill 2 Remake. I know there's a performance hit using RT. As long as the game is running at an acceptable frame rate I'm not too worried about performance. I've seen the difference in lighting and It's very significant in Cyberpunk 2077.

[–] [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!)