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Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

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Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#161

Post by ocdtrekkie »

rocqua wrote: post #130
ronjouch wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So annoying, yes. I since uninstalled GeForce Experience and replaced update notifications (the only feature I was using) with this ugly batch script. Careful, it's ugly! Botched stackoverflow-oriented batch brogramming! But it works for me! Feel free to reuse and improve :) @ECHO OFF setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion rem nvup.bat, a quick & dirty driver downloader since GeForce Experience requires a login. rem In a fo…

Sadly, that doesn't allow use of shadowplay. There are some older versions of nvidea experience floating around that still work with shadowplay without the login.

If you're on Windows 10, the built in games recorder is pretty fantastic, I prefer it over Shadowplay. Of course, a lot of people trying to avoid telemetry are probably still avoiding Windows 10.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#162

Post by roel_v »

lightedman wrote: post #15
existencebox wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I welcome the capitalistic response, I'm worried it won't be enough. As much as I'd love true competition in the GPU/CPU space, it doesn't exist. AMD's cards simply cannot compete with Nvidia for GPGPU type scenarios, and even in its basic capacity, often have known heat/perf issues. Now that may be worth it for now to make a statement against the telemetry, but what if (less if and more when IMO) AMD then…

" AMD's cards simply cannot compete with Nvidia for GPGPU type scenarios" Really? Which brand of GPU pretty much ran Bitcoin during its inception, again?

Try to write some GPU software on AMD cards, then compare that to the NVidia/CUDA experience. I don't know about the Bitcoin thing (maybe in the end, for very long lived code, the lower cost would be more important than the developer pain and time time required) but for pretty much all the HPC code I see, getting things running sooner and with more polished dev tools beats price/performance ratios every time. If you're spending a few thousand on Titans anyway, getting a few more cycles per watt doesn't matter all that much anymore; except for Bitcoin mining where your main cost is energy (by design).

So I think there's a very clear reason for that specific case.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#163

Post by fdgdasfadsf »

roel_v wrote: post #162
lightedman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" AMD's cards simply cannot compete with Nvidia for GPGPU type scenarios" Really? Which brand of GPU pretty much ran Bitcoin during its inception, again?

Try to write some GPU software on AMD cards, then compare that to the NVidia/CUDA experience. I don't know about the Bitcoin thing (maybe in the end, for very long lived code, the lower cost would be more important than the developer pain and time time required) but for pretty much all the HPC code I see, getting things running sooner and with more polished dev tools beats price/performance ratios every time. If you'…

Bitcoin mining uses lots of integer manipulation. AMD cards are faster for integer operations. Hence bitcoin miners used to use AMD cards.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#164

Post by dogma1138 »

stirner wrote: post #156
dogma1138 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been hearing about Wayland for a while wake me up when it's actually here. Also there is no problem with switchable GPU's which is specific to nVIDIA anymore the Optimus chip is no longer used (and haven't been for a while) since Intels Iris came out it powered a single generation of mobile GPUs and was a hack even on Windows.

> Also there is no problem with switchable GPU's which is specific to nVIDIA anymore the Optimus chip is no longer used Do you have a source for this? In any case, just because some hardware has been recently phased out doesn't mean the manufacturer shouldn't be expected to support it. Not everyone has enough money to buy a new computer every year; I'm a student with an Optimus laptop and I know I won't be able to af…

>If NVIDIA can't be asked to fully support their hardware on Linux, the least they can do is release some documentation so the Nouveau devs don't need to grope in the dark.

I don't disagree in principle, but they've killed it, releasing information to make it work might be a problem for them, and since this thing is no longer supported adding compatibility for older devices isn't a high priority for them.

It worked poorly on many windows machine, it's effectively still doesn't work on Windows 10 [0] and it's been effectively killed since 2014.

[0]https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/860554/geforce-mobi...

It's also worth noting that NVIDIA couldn't get the darn thing to work on Linux, it's also worth noting that AMD also had/has similar issues with PowerXpress on non-Iris based Intel CPUs, it does somewhat work well on AMD's own CPU's with integrated graphics and it's more modern "APUs".

>Do you have a source for this?

Source for what? under Iris Intel the CPU handles the switching between GPUs not that it works that well, but it doesn't work well on most OSs other than windows mostly due to how the display driver infrastructure is setup and how the composition manager works (even on OSX you still likely to want to use gpu-switch than rely on the OS).

If you want to blame some one blame the OS tbh, if OSX and Linux had proper user mode display drivers like WDDM, had modern display drivers like WDDM and actually had a composition manager capable of using multiple GPUs then there might be better solutions for this.

But overall it works, it does require you to use the proprietary drivers from both NVIDIA and Intel but it works, at least on Ubuntu I never had issues with following a similar guide to this http://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2016/04/switch-intel-nvi... (reading the comments on that guide it seems that it missing an important part which is apt-get install nvidia-prime) So this just works...

To switch between the 2 on demand you can simply use these commands:

-prime-select intel

-prime-select nvidia

On other distros (or if you are not using nvidia-prime) you might need to use /proc/acpi/bbswitch And modprobe/rmmod to do the switching, there are bash scripts online ready to use which are available as long as you have the proper drivers installed.

P.S. Sorta OT but relevant: http://i.imgur.com/Ql1dsZC.jpg

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#165

Post by Namidairo »

treebeard901 wrote: post #104
jaytaylor wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just uninstalled GeForce Experience and it immediately caused the already open Battlefield 1 game instance to crash. Way to go Nvidia.. uninstalling your non-driver app crashes games :)

> Way to go Nvidia.. uninstalling your non-driver app crashes games That's a weird edge case to support. After all, the app in question is responsible for recording in game video thus implying some kind of dependency.

I have the suspicion that their overlay drawing is fairly low level as it seems to manage to draw over programs which are injection unfriendly and exclusive fullscreen.

Evidently it does not handle getting the rug pulled from under itself well. :)

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#166

Post by maksimum »

frik wrote: post #57
webkike wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise. I originally downloaded GeForce experience when I was installing my drivers. When I noticed login was required I uninstalled and downloaded the drivers manually.

Probably many experienced user do that. Same with Windows since XP. Yet the companies don't learn and use such biased telemetry data for statistics and decide based on them. I wonder if Office and Windows UI got worse and worse, because of reading to much into telemetry data? The WindowsVista devs wrre pretty open in their official blog about it back then. And remember how it tanked, and that was just a small thing c…

A sample size of 1-10 C's isn't necessarily better than a sample size of 100ks of users who aren't intimately interested in their privacy. I think C's don't have the time to think about the multitude of possible workflows in their apps. On the other hand developers are so intimately familiar with their apps that they have a hard time "not knowing" what to do.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#167

Post by Klathmon »

michaelt wrote: post #148
Namrog84 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad for few users. But great for most. Testing less means they can release sooner. Here is a bad example. New game comes out. Graphical driver glitch crash. Typically would take 2 weeks to get to public as whole. Now with this they can release in 2 days to 10% fix up and release to whole by end of first week. So 90% of population got a fix sooner(1 week) And some percentage of the 10% may have had some annoyances. Su…

Here's a different example: A new driver improves game performance for 99.9% of customers, and disables graphics output for 0.1% of customers. The bug could have been caught with a few days of automated testing in a test lab with lots of different cards and system configurations, but that's slow and costs a lot of money to maintain - chucking it over the wall to consumers is quicker and cheaper. Seems to me getting t…

But in my experience there are a few more 9's on your "works" number for a specific issue.

Hardware-related problems are so fucking hard to debug in a lab. Many of the issues i've dealt with in the past only show up with pretty esoteric hardware mixtures, or are so specific that i'd be surprised if more than one person has that exact config on the planet.

A test lab might be able to get maybe a hundred different configurations. But in the wild, something like 60% of our users are on unique hardware configurations (as in nobody else has that exact set of hardware among our users).

Telemetry is pretty much the only real way you are going to be able to support a wide range of hardware when you start interacting with it on the lower levels, because buying and assembling all the different configurations is all but impossible, even if you prioritised it.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#168

Post by dogma1138 »

vetinari wrote: post #120
dogma1138 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been hearing about Wayland for a while wake me up when it's actually here. Also there is no problem with switchable GPU's which is specific to nVIDIA anymore the Optimus chip is no longer used (and haven't been for a while) since Intels Iris came out it powered a single generation of mobile GPUs and was a hack even on Windows.

Wayland is actually there; it has been shipping with Fedora for some time and for 25 (release in less than two weeks), it is going to be default. There is still problem with switchable GPUs: namely those, where one GPU is using Mesa and the other is not (i.e. Nvidia). Those computers didn't disappear for the face of the Earth, people are still using it and expect it to work, even if there are never laptops available…

Because of MESA, also nvidia tried to make Optimus work on Linux when it supported it couldn't.

Intel doesn't supports GPU switching on its MESA drivers it requires the proprietary one.

Get the prop nvidia and intel drivers and get nvidia prime and you are golden.

Same issue with AMD GPUs with intel CPUs especially the PowerXpress ones.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#169

Post by maksimum »

valarauca1 wrote: post #78
greydius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nouveau has no CUDA support, unfortunately.

CUDA is proprietary to Nvidia. CUDA only exists because Nvidia is attempting to pretend OpenCL, Vulkan, and DX12 don't exist [1]. These require hardware scheduling on the GPU to switch shaders. Rather then dedicated X amount of chip hardware to Y shader for Z ms. It should be noted for GPGPU compute Nvidia is not the correct choice. AMD RX 480 has 5.8TFLOPS @$200 ($37/TFLOP) vs Nvidia GTX1080 8.9TFLOPS @$600 ($67/TFL…

I agree with your point about avoiding vendor lockins, something I experienced for myself with MATLAB. I also happened to buy a RX 480 recently, so I'm happy to hear it's good for GPGPU.

But I'm curious in how the FLOPS on these cards were measured. For example one concern I have is that presumably these two cards have slightly different levels of parallelism. So it may be more or less difficult to extract the full performance from a particular card due to parallelism overhead. Then there's driver overhead, ease of programming, etc.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#170

Post by taneq »

ronjouch wrote: post #16
brink wrote: post #6

On a related note; I can't even use NVidia's "Geforce Experience" any more without logging in. Thanks for that, NVidia. Just what I wanted; a driver tool that forces me to log in.

So annoying, yes. I since uninstalled GeForce Experience and replaced update notifications (the only feature I was using) with this ugly batch script. Careful, it's ugly! Botched stackoverflow-oriented batch brogramming! But it works for me! Feel free to reuse and improve :) @ECHO OFF setLocal EnableDelayedExpansion rem nvup.bat, a quick & dirty driver downloader since GeForce Experience requires a login. rem In a fo…

Be aware that even if you manually installed the driver in the first place and have never had GFE installed, Windows Update will helpfully install GFE for you if you let it update the driver.
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