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Nvidia Adds Telemetry To Latest Drivers (ghacks.net)
An anonymous reader shares a report on Ghack: Telemetry -- read tracking -- seems to be everywhere these days. Microsoft pushes it on Windows, and web and software companies use it as well. While there is certainly some benefit to it on a larger scale, as it may enable these companies to identify broader issues, it is undesirable from a user perspective. Part of that comes from the fact that companies fail to disclose what is being collected and how data is stored and handled once it leaves the user system. In the case of Nvidia, Telemetry gets installed alongside the driver package. While you may customize the installation of the Nvidia driver so that only the bits that you require are installed, there is no option to disable the Telemetry components from being installed. These do get installed even if you only install the graphics driver itself in the custom installation dialog.Further reading on MajorGeeks.
> apt-get install nvidia-current
This can break you if your card doesn't work with the current version, I'm pretty sure.
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to...
My point, however, is that it can look simple in any distro, actually be complex, and is entirely different from distro to distro. I've seen issues updating initramfs, and issues doing whatever kernel dance is required- and in the cases where it works, it isn't because of nvidia, it's because of good packaging for that distro by someone.
> Now, I can add "respects my privacy".
The Linux version still does, though it may simply be by accident or an unwillingness to find a way to spy in each and every distro. Still, the general feeling is that the open source AMD driver is miles better than the open source nvidia driver (a fact not the fault of the open source devs, who nvidia treats like mushrooms, keeping them in the dark and feeding them shit). Obviously, if a future version has telemetry nonsense somehow, I simply won't buy the card, but that's an issue for a future me.
Telemetry is also there to help product owners to determine which features of the software are used the most. It allows product owners to have a better understanding how their software is used over all.
It's a frigging driver. First, "product owners" should stop insisting on bundling 5 different crap software packages when all I want to download is a driver (not easy to get individually).
According to TFA driver itself comes with telemetry too. But I am guessing that "driving of the hardware" is the most frequently used feature in that case. It's the only reason for getting that driver in the first place.
Basically just don't use 'GeForce Experience'. Honestly unless you're just one of these weird-os that can't live without social medial integration of your games then you can avoid all of this by not installing Experience. And honestly, why would any one?
Of course then this will only probably work until they make it mandatory, as these companies always try to do.
I have a GTX 980, so I immediately RTFA and looked for the task they referenced in the Task Scheduler. FWIW, I did not find the task referenced in the article or anything at all related to nvidia. I have the latest driver package from nvidia installed. YMMV.
Just confirmed this on my own system. This telemetry is all a part 'GeForce Experience'. People should just uninstall that crap anyway as there's really nothing of value in that product anyway.
Just uninstall 'GeForce Experience'. The tracking is all inside of it.
Just uninstall 'GeForce Experience'. The tracking is all inside of it.
Can you explain this then?:
While you may customize the installation of the Nvidia driver so that only the bits that you require are installed, there is no option to disable the Telemetry components from being installed. These do get installed even if you only install the graphics driver itself in the custom installation dialog.
So why do they make users consent to allow nVidia permission to collect "personally identifiable information" for the purposes of "deliver[ing] marketing communications" and collect "games and applications settings, performance, and usage data" although it is "not limited to" doing just this?
That ain't just for "understanding" that's for exploitation and profit from "personally identifiable" customer data.
This shit is spyware.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
RWT "showed" that using a generations-old card, from a time when it's unlikely that Nvidia used tile-based rasterization, either. Modern AMD cards do use tile-based rasterization. They have since at least the Tonga chip, and possibly earlier - I don't recall for certain. (As a hint, any card that uses color compression has to use tile-based rasterization.) If you don't believe me, it's been discussed thoroughly on some of the more technically oriented forums.
The performance gap between the AMD architecture and the Nvidia architecture has to do with the focus of their design - AMD focuses heavily on compute, and Nvidia more on the rest of the graphics pipeline. Thus, Nvidia cards tend to be better in both performance and perf/watt in most games, but that's reversed in games that are very heavy in compute, or (complex) pure compute workloads.
As a general rule, there's never one 'best' piece of hardware. Different designs have different strengths and weaknesses, and you should pick the one that works best for you.