In search of a video card

Robert Noland rnoland at FreeBSD.org
Thu May 14 14:40:36 UTC 2009


On Thu, 2009-05-14 at 16:10 +0930, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> On Thu, 14 May 2009, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> > 2009/5/14 Josef Grosch <jgrosch at mooseriver.com>:
> > > I don't need 2d & 3d acceleration. I just need a card that will
> > > handle WindowMaker on a 24 inch Dell monitor at 1920x1200 and as
> > > long as the flesh tones on my JPGs don't suck I'm happy.
> > >
> > > Thanks for the advice. I guess I'm going to make a trip to Fry's
> > > Friday.
> >
> > I've experienced no-acceleration radeon driver "desktop" under Ubuntu
> > and FreeBSD; let me please point out how sluggish and horribly slow
> > it is.
> 
> Depends how unaccelerated it is.
> 
> VESA is pretty damn slow, but even minimal radeon/radeonhd support is 
> fast enough for desktop use.
> 
> > I gave up trying to get accelerated 3d + dualhead support on the
> > card(s) I was using - apparently the hardware just didn't do a single
> > viewport span across 2 1280x1024 screens :(
> > (The max viewport width was 2048 pixels..)
> >
> > 2d acceleration may be a must for that kind of resolution..
> 
> If you have a fast CPU & decent pipe to video memory it isn't necessary, 
> but very nice.

Folks,

2d (EXA) should work on virtually any radeon with 7.2 or 8.0.  3d is
currently works on r500 and below.  AMD has released preliminary code
for 3d on r600+, which I've been working with lately.  It isn't ready
yet, but it will be soon.

If you only need 2d, then Nvidia is also an option.  At least if you are
ok with running my patch to enable nouveau drm.  I've recently managed
to get 3d sortof working on NV50 as well, not sure what kind of timeline
that will be though, since it is using gallium and isn't as well tested
as the old dri code.

robert.

-- 
Robert Noland <rnoland at FreeBSD.org>
FreeBSD
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 196 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/attachments/20090514/f2c3bf27/attachment-0001.pgp


More information about the freebsd-hackers mailing list