Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 23:52:40 -0400 From: Brian T.Schellenberger <bts@babbleon.org> To: Kenneth Culver <culverk@yumyumyum.org> Cc: tuc@ttsg.com, freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dell 8200 - NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go - XF86 Message-ID: <20020426035240.09A79BB29@i8k.babbleon.org> In-Reply-To: <200204252214.33906.culverk@yumyumyum.org> References: <200204260200.WAA00709@heimdall.ttsg.com> <20020426020722.36BAABB29@i8k.babbleon.org> <200204252214.33906.culverk@yumyumyum.org>
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On Thursday 25 April 2002 10:14 pm, Kenneth Culver wrote:
| On Thursday 25 April 2002 10:07 pm, Brian T.Schellenberger wrote:
| > On Thursday 25 April 2002 10:00 pm, Tuc wrote:
| > | Hi,
| > |
| > | Just bought a Dell 8200 with :
| > |
| > | NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go video controller with 64 MB of DDR RAM
| >
| > That's unfortunate; it would have been better to get an ATI chip (which
| > were available upon request for the 7500, 8000, and 8100, at least, so
| > probably for the 8200 though I don't know for sure).
| >
| > But I think you can make it work if you cvsup to the latest ports and
| > build XFree86 4.2 from the ports.
| >
| > nvidia is, in general, bad news, and the best advice is to stay away from
| > them if you can.
|
| I'd have to disagree, there's nothing faster right now, and pretty soon,
| they'll have fully supported FreeBSD drivers, as well as the current linux
| drivers...
It's not true that nothing's faster. My ATI can redraw the screen in a small
fraction of second under FreeBSD; as Tuc has discovered, this same operation
might take months with an nvidia card.
Once the FreeBSD drivers are *actually* out, then the advice might change,
though I would still want to "vote with my dollars" for non-proprietary
solutions, but that will be a mere matter of principle. Right now, principle
and pragmatics both strongly suggest avoiding nvidia cards whenever possible.
If I *had* to have the faster graphics, I'd get an nvidia card and dump
FreeBSD in favor of Linux, but I don't, so I go the other way. Actually
getting nvidia to work under FreeBSD right now is possible but it is *not*
easy. I wouldn't do it unless I had a strong reason to do so and I
understood what I was facing.
| Ken
--
Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal)
http://www.babbleon.org
http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org
If you smell the smoke you don't need to be told what you've got to do;
Yet there's a certain breed, so very in-between, they'd rather take a
vote. -- DEVO -- Here To Go
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