Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2007 23:03:19 +0200 From: Danny Pansters <danny@ricin.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: AMD64 Message-ID: <200704182303.20059.danny@ricin.com> In-Reply-To: <19889.31715.qm@web88307.mail.re4.yahoo.com> References: <19889.31715.qm@web88307.mail.re4.yahoo.com>
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On Wednesday 18 April 2007 21:30:14 Michael S wrote: > Good day all. > > I am getting my (first) Athlon 64 x 2 today or > tomorrow and was wondering whether I should stick with > the reliable x86 or try the AMD64 port. I'd try it but ... > Any performance penalties when running x86 FreeBSD on > a 64-bit machine? ... for some things it may ... > Also what are the common problems, i.e. drivers, > applications that are known not to work under the > AMD64. This is going to be a desktop/workstation type > system. ... there are quite a few 3rd party things that don't work or that need kludgy 32bits emulation. Flash comes to mind, also (MS/Real/..) media codecs. All the stuff we love to hate. Most importantly though, you can't use nvidia driver (32bit). I have a spare amd64 box with a nvidia based board (ASUS SLI something with the graphics card in a PCI Express slot, gforce4 IIRC) and I found I could only use plain (xorg) nv driver, and had to disable any hardware acceleration. Else it would just reboot randomly. I only use this machine to test kbtv on amd64. Moving the TV window around or resizing it is painfully slow (the video itself is OK but it eats a lot more CPU with non accelerated x rendering, up to 10%). Needless to say the machine is turned off most of the time... So I think what matters is whether these things matter to you :) I don't think the base system is any faster or slower. But it depends on what you're going to use it for. HTH, Dan
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