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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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[–] voracitude 1 points 3 days ago (5 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...

[–] Thaurin 5 points 3 days ago (2 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.

[–] voracitude 2 points 2 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.

[–] Thaurin 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 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!

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