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.
Depends on the game. Developers have become very good at using tricks to make rasterization look good and realistic, but they are still just tricks. Some games’ ray tracing look extremely good and have effects that would not be possible without it, though.