Ever since AMD put in the effort into open source Linux drivers, I've been only buying Radeon GPUs. This is a reminder of why I don't want to rely on proprietary drivers.
Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
211–220 of 242 posts
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, if someone e.g. gets my complete hw fingerprint, I'm identifiable. But it's no worse than I'm already uniquely id'd by visiting pretty much any website today. I don't like it, but I also don't see a point in being outraged when my music player does it but not when my favorite website does it.
You seem very willing to just dish your data over to everyone - can I install some software on your computer, too?
Well if you make a piece of useful software I'll install it (I'd rather install it myself).
I'm not very generous with my data at all - but I'd rather trust my firewall to protect my data, than a dialog that asks me if I'm OK with sharing it. That was my point.
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy moly, I thought that this post was a joke for sure - and then I checked out GeForce Experience. Uninstalled. Never to be reinstalled. AMD will be my next card. Thanks nVidia for letting me know what you think of me :)
My employer took took a shipment of fifteen Dell computers a few months ago - with ATI Radeon HD 8570 graphics cards (3 years old, with DP 1.2 and 4k support so not obsolete by any means, and certified for Ubuntu 14.04 [1]) Then Ubuntu 16.04 comes out, and guess what? No fglrx driver support any more [2] and users report the open source drivers use about a core and a half worth of CPU, slowing down their entire machi…
ATI is AMD now.
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paying for email sounds weird to most people these days, but now that I do, I'd never have it any other way again.
I'm days away from moving to fastmail. May I ask what service you're currently using? Are you happy with it?
Fastmail for features and ease of use. Protonmail if you want security.
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
I noticed the same thing. It's ridiculous. Geforce Experience doesn't do anything I care about except auto-update drivers. Why do I need to log in for that?
you forgot game capture/streaming and automatic game setting optimization
I use GameDVR (agario can take the framerate hit). GameDVR has a bug where Windows won't draw menus until I unplug and replug the monitor after using it (sometimes), so I did try Nvidia's thing. That recorded the start page for agario and my mouse. It was super interesting to watch, but not what I wanted. Maybe it works better for "real" games.
Anyway, everything is shit ;)
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 p…
FLOPS is always calculated via the simple formual
F * (1/Hz) * 2 = FLOPS
Where Hz is the well.. the clock rate, inverse to get cycles per second. This is wrong because stalls happen, memory transfers, cache misses etc. It is also wrong because the clock rate is throttled and you are not always at Maximum boost clock.
Then multiply by 2 for FMA (fused multiply add). This is wrong because well not every operation is a one cycle FMA. Division can be many (>100). Also scalar pipelines don't have FMA.
Ultimately all vendors use the same crappy calculation so we are comparing apples to apples. Just rotten apples to rotten apples. It gives you a good ideal circumstance you can optimize towards but never actually attain.
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Do the power consumption numbers cancel out the up-front price advantage?
RX480 consumes less power then the GTX1080 so they'd amplify the initial price advantage.
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#218Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that gives you a bit more courage to release things early because you'll see problems faster and can fix them. I gotta say, if the major benefit of telemetry is that vendors can test less before they release, that sounds like a bad thing not a good thing for users?
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…
My AMD drivers & Steam Client already report crashes
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
Real issue here though is it doesn't seem like they have an opt out option.
There is, don't install Geforce Experience, GFE has always sent some data to NVIDIA now they are also collecting driver telemetry. GFE requires a separate installation and for you to signup and login. This isn't a service required for you to get GPU drivers. The only thing you lose is NVIDIA's screen capture software and game optimization (and some deals sometimes). You can still use your card to the fullest without…
That is not a really valid "opt-out" function since they are heavily advertising GFE and most of the people who have it, because they have to, have no idea what's happening. Even after this discovery, a ridiculously small amount of new people know that there is something shady going on.
This looks bad, it smells bad and it probably is just bad for the customer. The person that has already payed for the damn product and not for whatever happens in the background and I have to look up first somewhere on the internet...This behaviour towards customers is disgusting and I really hope it'll backfire in a spectacular way one day.
Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Intel doesn't have a proprietary driver for GPUs for Linux. They do have a binary firmware, for Broxton and newer, however that's a thing that runs on the GPU. It does not have anything with how Mesa or other OpenGL stack shares buffers and video output devices.
Sorry that's what I mean, in Ubuntu it's under the display driver, they call it microcode.