Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?
Currently using a Radeon 8500LE but since u/g to xorg 7.3 I've had nothing but trouble with X hanging/crashing/locking-up. From what I've read, the state of the radeon drivers leaves much to be desired and although some people seem to have trouble with nVidia cards they appear to be a better choice. So, after over a decade of brand-loyalty to ATI (when I started with FreeBSD back in the mid-90's ATI cards were the only ones I could find that would run X at better than VGA resolution) I'm going to switch to nVidia. The machine is FreeBSD-only so no issues with Windows drivers and performance etc. (I divorced the Evil Empire a couple of years ago) and my Radeon 8500 is adequate for my needs so I don't need a high-end card. I'm looking on eBay and an FX5x00 card seems to fit the bill. So, are there any particular cards that work well under Xorg/FreeBSD or, more importantly, any that don't? Any advice about the need to consider 3D issues would be welcome? I run KDE and mainly use digikam/GIMP for digital photo editing and kmplayer for viewing videos. I believe there is a 3D interface for KDE (CompuViz?) - is this worth bothering with? All help/advice gratefully received. TIA Mark ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?
Mark Ovens wrote: Currently using a Radeon 8500LE but since u/g to xorg 7.3 I've had nothing but trouble with X hanging/crashing/locking-up. From what I've read, the state of the radeon drivers leaves much to be desired and although some people seem to have trouble with nVidia cards they appear to be a better choice. So, after over a decade of brand-loyalty to ATI (when I started with FreeBSD back in the mid-90's ATI cards were the only ones I could find that would run X at better than VGA resolution) I'm going to switch to nVidia. The machine is FreeBSD-only so no issues with Windows drivers and performance etc. (I divorced the Evil Empire a couple of years ago) and my Radeon 8500 is adequate for my needs so I don't need a high-end card. I'm looking on eBay and an FX5x00 card seems to fit the bill. So, are there any particular cards that work well under Xorg/FreeBSD or, more importantly, any that don't? Any advice about the need to consider 3D issues would be welcome? I run KDE and mainly use digikam/GIMP for digital photo editing and kmplayer for viewing videos. I believe there is a 3D interface for KDE (CompuViz?) - is this worth bothering with? All help/advice gratefully received. TIA Mark Don't know about CompuViz, but if you would like to try compiz fusion, I am a bit tempted to point you to this article (maybe because I am the author :) http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/compiz-fusion/ This will answer your questions on installing nvidia drivers and also getting 3D effects and compiz-fusion to work. Note that there is no nvidia-supplied (read: proprietary) driver for the 64bit version of FreeBSD. The community 'nvidia' driver works fine, although no 3D and 2D performance is somewhat limited. I've used a number of cards with FreeBSD (7300GT, 7300Go (laptop), 6600GT, 6200) and never had problems. The FX series should also work, but why not buying a newer card? You can get new entry-level nvidia cards for very little money. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?
Manolis Kiagias wrote: Don't know about CompuViz, but if you would like to try compiz fusion, I am a bit tempted to point you to this article (maybe because I am the author :) Ah, compiz - that's what I was thinking of ;-) http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/compiz-fusion/ This will answer your questions on installing nvidia drivers and also getting 3D effects and compiz-fusion to work. Note that there is no nvidia-supplied (read: proprietary) driver for the 64bit version of FreeBSD. The community 'nvidia' driver works fine, although no 3D and 2D performance is somewhat limited. I've used a number of cards with FreeBSD (7300GT, 7300Go (laptop), 6600GT, 6200) and never had problems. The FX series should also work, but why not buying a newer card? You can get new entry-level nvidia cards for very little money. Well, it's down to money really but I'll take a look at the price of new cards. Thanks. Mark ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:04:40PM +0100, Mark Ovens wrote: Currently using a Radeon 8500LE but since u/g to xorg 7.3 I've had nothing but trouble with X hanging/crashing/locking-up. From what I've read, the state of the radeon drivers leaves much to be desired and although some people seem to have trouble with nVidia cards they appear to be a better choice. So, after over a decade of brand-loyalty to ATI (when I started with FreeBSD back in the mid-90's ATI cards were the only ones I could find that would run X at better than VGA resolution) I'm going to switch to nVidia. Heh. I was just thinking about going the other way. One of the main problems with the nVidia on X is that the xorg-nvidia driver is very basic; this can be demonstrated by going to a Javascript heavy page (eg http://www.xwiki.org) using firefox. The X-server just slows to crawl when trying to scroll the site. The behaviour is not exhibited with xorg-intel driver, as a counter-example. Support for the nVidia on FreeBSD from the vendor is also incomplete: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-June/016995.html The feature request from nVidia appears to have stalled for the time being (more correctly: I couldn't locate news on any updates to on the 'Net). In short, nVidia cards are usable, but performance can be exceptionally bad. Cheers. -- Jonathan Chen [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Only the meek get pinched. The bold survive. - Ferris Bueller ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Jonathan Chen wrote: On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:04:40PM +0100, Mark Ovens wrote: Currently using a Radeon 8500LE but since u/g to xorg 7.3 I've had nothing but trouble with X hanging/crashing/locking-up. From what I've read, the state of the radeon drivers leaves much to be desired and although some people seem to have trouble with nVidia cards they appear to be a better choice. So, after over a decade of brand-loyalty to ATI (when I started with FreeBSD back in the mid-90's ATI cards were the only ones I could find that would run X at better than VGA resolution) I'm going to switch to nVidia. Heh. I was just thinking about going the other way. One of the main problems with the nVidia on X is that the xorg-nvidia driver is very basic; this can be demonstrated by going to a Javascript heavy page (eg http://www.xwiki.org) using firefox. The X-server just slows to crawl when trying to scroll the site. The behaviour is not exhibited with xorg-intel driver, as a counter-example. Support for the nVidia on FreeBSD from the vendor is also incomplete: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-June/016995.html The feature request from nVidia appears to have stalled for the time being (more correctly: I couldn't locate news on any updates to on the 'Net). In short, nVidia cards are usable, but performance can be exceptionally bad. 'Scuse me, I'm not personally very familiar (yet) with 3D graphics, but I'm reading OpenGL (I bought the SuperBible) and I'm quite well along in writing my driver for a cheapy graphics tablet, to get me along with Gimp. So, could you tell me, are your comments about the Nvidia card driver performance dealing with the Nvidia-supplied driver and OpenGL libs they have, as expressed in the FreeBSD-ports supplied (from Nvidia code) Nvidia driver?? I have them compiled under FreeBSD-current, because a friend recommended them as the best available, is that wrong? Is there better? I am not aware of any pure-public driver for those cards, but I just am not very well up on their details, so I want to be sure of your meaning, making sure I have you right here.. BTW, my card is a Nvidia-compatible (licensed) GeForce 8600 GTS card, if that means anything to you. If you think the ATI cards (using FreeBSD available drivers) are better, let me have that one more time please, there is very little on the net from even slightly reliable sources on this, so I would guess you have a attentive audience here. Cheers. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v2.0.4 (FreeBSD) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFIOhibz62J6PPcoOkRAoUFAJ4iG+lO49cL3X2qNrRWDwpvPgaAmwCfWd67 zmGMC23pwA6mE5w2LycKB/k= =97lJ -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?
On Mon, 26 May 2008 10:54:28 +1200 Jonathan Chen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Support for the nVidia on FreeBSD from the vendor is also incomplete: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-June/016995.html The feature request from nVidia appears to have stalled That article says: While the following is focused on the NVIDIA FreeBSD graphics drivers, we believe the interfaces discussed below are generally applicable to any modern high performance graphics driver. Aside from the amd64 specific issues, it's doesn't seem to imply that NVIDIA cards are particularly disadvantaged, just that NVIDIA are the only company to make an effort with FreeBSD. In short, nVidia cards are usable, but performance can be exceptionally bad. The xorg nv driver is certainly poor, but is there any reason to believe that the nvidia driver is inferior to drivers for other graphics cards. I've never heard any great claims for their 3d performance. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?
On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 09:55:39PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote: [...] So, could you tell me, are your comments about the Nvidia card driver performance dealing with the Nvidia-supplied driver and OpenGL libs they have, as expressed in the FreeBSD-ports supplied (from Nvidia code) Nvidia driver?? I have them compiled under FreeBSD-current, because a friend recommended them as the best available, is that wrong? Is there better? I am not aware of any pure-public driver for those cards, but I just am not very well up on their details, so I want to be sure of your meaning, making sure I have you right here.. I've got a nVidia card on a FreeBSD-7/amd64 system, and so the only driver I can use is the xorg-nvidia driver. The driver from the nVidia is not an option for me. If you have an i386 system, the driver from nVidia is *MUCH* faster than the xorg driver. Queries to nVidia about the possiblity of an amd64 compatibile driver led me to the kernel-feature list that they would like to have before being able to release a driver form amd64 hosts. HTH. -- Jonathan Chen [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
