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Are NVIDIA proprietary drivers spyware? (self.linuxquestions)

submitted 3 days ago by daggermoon to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] daggermoon 1 points 3 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.

[–] voracitude 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 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!)