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.
What exact GPU are you considering? While GPUs like the 3060/4060 technically support raytracing, they will not offer a sufficiently comfortable experience to make use of it. You’ll definitely have to consider a more powerful GPU. So if you are in the market for a sub-500$ GPU, you can simply ignore raytracing. And that is even more true the higher up in resolution you go.
Here you can witness the drop in performance (on average about 30%) due to raytracing on high end cards, at high resolution with dlss/fsr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTeKzJsoL3k
I’m considering the NVIDIA RTX-4070 Super. I was impressed with it’s performance in Cyberpunk 2077.