Card for basic 3D acceleration in FreeBSD

[Hans Nieser]

Micah wrote:
> Hans Nieser wrote:
>> Micah wrote:
>>> I'm looking for a card to handle some simple OpenGL stuff for a class
>>> I'm taking.  I have an ATI X300 card, but 3D acceleration is not
>>> supported on it in the current Xorg.  The only slots on my Mobo are PCI
>>> and PCI-EX.  I use the i386 release of FreeBSD currently, but would like
>>> to have the option to move to the amd64 release.  Any suggestions on a
>>> low-end (read cheap) card?  I know "nvidia" is often recommended, but
>>> any particular model?
>>>
>>
>> I myself ran into an issue with FreeBSD and nvidia where my PCI-Express
>> Geforce 6800GT only gave a fraction of the performance that I should have
>> been able to get. After asking about it on the nvidia forums at
>> nvnews.net
>> I was told that there is an issue between the nvidia driver and FreeBSD
>> kernel that affect non-native PCI-Express cards, it was being worked on
>> but for now I am still suffering from it. More info:
>>
>> http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=59981
> 
> Yeah, I've seen that problem mentioned in previous posts.  How terrible
> is the performance?  I just need something that can get more than 1 fps
> on simple ogl class projects.
> 
> Additionally, does anyone know the answer to the last question in the
> thread pointed to above? "Exactly which nvidia cards are/are not
> 'native' PCI-Express?"
> 

Well, the performance isn't too horrible I think, especially if you're
just going to run some basic OpenGL apps. I think it was roughly 1/4 to
1/3 of what I would get in Windows in a game like Doom 3, games like Quake
3 actually ran at about 40-50 FPS on the Geforce 6800GT

I too am curious about which cards are native PCI-Express