Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2011 05:23:57 +0100 From: Michal Varga <varga.michal@gmail.com> To: Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org> Cc: freebsd-x11@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Nvidia driver? Message-ID: <1294115037.1500.36.camel@xenon> In-Reply-To: <iftucp$rrv$1@dough.gmane.org> References: <iftucp$rrv$1@dough.gmane.org>
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On Tue, 2011-01-04 at 02:49 +0100, Ivan Voras wrote: > For ages now I've been buying ATI cards for my home dual-boot machine, Ow. > but it looks like the driver situation is only getting worse so I'm > thinking of switching camps to nvidia. > Well as a long time nvidia user (counting back to Riva 128 days and iirc owned a few pieces from about every single nvidia generation), I could probably answer some of your questions, if that's ok. > How good, well supported and easy to setup is the binary nvidia driver > for FreeBSD? As for good - it's amazing, always has been (and I'm not a fanboy, just someone who can easily tell). 50% of reasons why you buy an nvidia card is their driver support (the other 50% being that it's nvidia and not ATI crap, but I doubt you would want to hear that part). Easy to setup - very. FreeBSD's nvidia ports use to lag behind official nvidia releases, but nvidia drivers are fairly clean and straightforward (and distfile structure rarely changes), so people just make their own ports whenever needed (sadly that's most the time, as nvidia doesn't release new drivers without any reason). Anyway - most the time it's as much work as editing a new version number in makefile, make makesum and upgrade/reinstall if you want to keep pace with nvidia and port maintainers are getting sleepy again. > Is amd64 supported? How about 9-current / HEAD? ADM64 - yes. Personally I don't run any amd64 systems for reasons unrelated, but a fair share of nvidia users do (still, far from majority). Anyway, as far as I can tell, works about the same as i386 drivers. CURRENT/HEAD - no idea, sorry. > (and an almost offtopic question - what is the NV equivalent of a > [45]6xx mid-range card?) I could probably answer that if you were more specific about your needs, as I have no idea what ATI model numbers mean (despite that I own some, just can't force myself to care - I mean it's ATI after all. That's all one needs to know). So, if you could be more specific about your preferences, from say, gaming/3d/opengl/video/movie acceleration/desktop performance/heat buildup/power consumption/price range/I don't want to be your betatester k thanks bye/ aspects, I could probably easily elaborate, but usually when ex-ATI owners just ask about their model numbers, all I have to offer is a sad look. And that wouldn't help you much :) m. -- Michal Varga, Stonehenge (Gmail account)
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