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Date:      Tue, 25 Jul 2000 18:23:33 -0400
From:      Coleman Kane <cokane@one.net>
To:        Mike Muir <mmuir@es.co.nz>
Cc:        Coleman Kane <cokane@one.net>, freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: agp and 3dfx
Message-ID:  <20000725182333.B7611@cokane.yi.org>
In-Reply-To: <397DD213.D83F9156@es.co.nz>; from mmuir@es.co.nz on Tue, Jul 25, 2000 at 01:45:16PM -0400
References:  <20000725043919.26222.qmail@web1609.mail.yahoo.com> <20000725133538.A6627@cokane.yi.org> <397DD213.D83F9156@es.co.nz>

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The 3dfx cards do work under FreeBSD, just not using glide. XFree86 4+
uses DRI to accomplish its 3D acceleration. If you want to use glide
games through linux emulation, you can either run them as root (not
acceptable many times, at least for me :), or you will be able to use
them with this driver once it gets the last bugs worked out. It works
fine for Voodoo1's and 2's, just have some trouble with the resource
setup on the Voodoo 3's.

As far as the NVidia binary drivers go, I don't think they are planning any
releases for FreeBSD. Personally, I don't want to endorse this sort of behavior
from manufacturers like NVidia giving out binary-only drivers. I don't buy their
cards because of that, and also because I can't afford them. There is a small
amount of total IP that can be gotten from reading source code, and it is too
small for a company to bother trying to parse through to understand. They'd wate
too much time trying to figure it out, that it wouldn't matter once they were
done. Anyway, I don't want to go out on a rant about lame business practices,
the basic idea here is no, NVidia doesn't provide binary only drivers for
FreeBSD, and we don't really care for the idea of closed source drivers. Closed
source drivers just make it a pain for everyone to get work done from
installation to associated programming (say, extensions to the drivers). I'm not
gonna go into a holy war here or reveal what I think they are closing them for,
but basically, they are not expected to come ever. You can simply use the
included on in XFree86 4.0.1, which I think supposrts DRI.

Mike Muir had the audacity to say:
> 
> Coleman Kane wrote:
> > 
> > XFree86-4 has been updated to the newest version. It has a kld named
> > tdfx.ko that must be installed into /modules/. When you load X, it will
> > load dri, agp, and tdfx all for you. There is also a 3dfx.ko to work
> > with /dev/3dfx. This is provided to support device accesses for glide
> > programs, like quake3 and all. It currently has some issues with the
> > Voodoo3 and Banshee hardware, but I could use another tester. It is part
> > of -CURRENT, and will most likely panic your box, but some output sent
> > to me about the crash would be helpful. Actually, if anyone has an old
> > agp 3dfx card they'dl ike to donate for this development, it would be
> > helpful. I have been testing it with my voodoo2 board with much success,
> > but I have had some responses from users with Voodoo3's that say that
> > they haven't gotten it to work.
> 
> What about Nvidia's 5.xx linux driver effort... what kind of effort
> would be required to get that running on FreeBSD?
> 
> 	-mike
> 

-- 
Coleman Kane
President, 
UC Free O.S. Users Group - http://pohl.ececs.uc.edu


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