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Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

majorgeeks.com

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Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#3

Post by dogma1138 »

bhouston wrote: post #2

Good. Telemetry should have been in these video drivers for crash reporting for a decade. Would have helped a ton with various video game crashs and the low quality of video drivers.

Yep, atm NVIDIA and AMD can only get display driver crash data directly from Microsoft. From what I've been told they not only have to pay for it, but while the data has statistical significance it has very low technical value on it's own.

So as far as things go now what happens is, new game is released, players with card X and configuration Y N P and Z complain about driver crashes over reddit/forums, NVIDIA/AMD picks up on it and then starts to try to figure what the hell is going on. Usually some initial mitigating actions would be released within a few days, and within a week to a month a full driver update will be released.

While this isn't the end of the world, it's annoying that you have issues that prevent you from enjoying a game that you paid 60$ for on a system that you likely paid at least 1000$ if not 3-4 times that.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#7

Post by userbinator »

bhouston wrote: post #2

Good. Telemetry should have been in these video drivers for crash reporting for a decade. Would have helped a ton with various video game crashs and the low quality of video drivers.

No, crash reporting is easily done with logs, preferably in some format you could redact any sensitive information from. This seems more like the "I will secretly phone home and not tell you about it or what I'm sending" kind of thing.

These are GPU drivers. It's not at all unreasonable that there may be something sensitive shown on the screen when a crash occurs. It might not even be shown on the screen but still present in GPU memory:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873059

I would not be surprised if the telemetry included some parts of GPU state which could contain sensitive data.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#8

Post by LinuxBender »

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.

I blocked their telemetry and not I can't even update my drivers. Not through windows update, nor through their installer. It hangs trying to talk back to them.

No harm, no foul, probably time to give AMD cards a chance. Variety is the spice of life and the spice must flow.

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#9

Post by throwaway2048 »

bhouston wrote: post #2

Good. Telemetry should have been in these video drivers for crash reporting for a decade. Would have helped a ton with various video game crashs and the low quality of video drivers.

they are sending way more than crash data. Just like most of the people that claim "telemetry" is only to fix bugs...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/5bcppp/nvidia...

Re: Nvidia adds telemetry to latest drivers

#10

Post by squarefoot »

EpicEng wrote: post #5
bnmillar wrote: post #4

In the words of Linus, "Nvidia, Fuck You"

Why, exactly?

Some background. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVpOyKCNZYw

Shouldn't be a problem anymore under Linux as most distros today install Nouveau drivers by default. https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/

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