PCI Express graphics reliability/functionality in 6.1?
Stephen Montgomery-Smith
stephen at math.missouri.edu
Fri Jun 9 02:31:54 UTC 2006
Clifton Royston wrote:
> I'm soon to build myself a new AMD X2 workstation system on which I
> plan to multiboot various operating systems including FreeBSD, a couple
> Linux distros and probably Windows XP Pro, and probably also run
> virtualization software (VMWare and/or Xen.) I'm hoping for it to last
> me through a few years of occasional upgrades, which makes me dubious
> about choosing an AGP motherboard.
>
> I can't find anything specific about PCI Express in the 6.1 release
> notes. However, I have Googled up some reports of various PCI-E
> graphic cards working badly in Xorg under FreeBSD and other open source
> OSes. In general should PCI Express graphics cards work properly and
> perform reasonably well for Xorg and OpenGL graphics under FreeBSD, if
> I avoid the "touchier" nVidia cards, or do I need to stick with AGP for
> reliability?
I have a PCI-E nvidia card 6600 with a particular Intel board (whose
numbers I don't remember right now) which used to be problematic, and
generated quite a few messages on the internet to that effect. But it
turned out to be a problem with the BIOS on the motherboard which was
fixed when Intel came out with a BIOS upgrade.
So what I am saying is that the problem might be motherboard specific
rather than graphics card specific.
Stephen
More information about the freebsd-hackers
mailing list