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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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[–] 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!