the best graphicscard for FreeBSD

[Marwan Burelle]

On Thu, Nov 25, 2004 at 09:41:30PM +0100, Stein M. Sandbech wrote:
> 
> On Nov 25, 2004, at 9:03 PM, Matthias Buelow wrote:
> 
> >Harald Arnesen wrote:
> >
> >>All Radeons up to 9100 (9200, but that one is slower). Unfortunately,
> >>that excludes all reasonably new cards.
> >
> >The newer cards work very well.  I have a X800se PCI-Express card and 
> >it works like a charm with X.org 6.8.1 on 5.3.
> 
> Which also the newest nVidia cards also do. I got a brand new Intel MB 
> based P4 with nVidia GeForce 6  6600 GPU
> (on PCI Express of course). They run flawlessly in VESA mode 
> (FreeBSD5.3 and 4.10).  Fast enough for me as a
> regular 2D accelerator.

In fact this not enough, I've got a Quadro FX 500 on my box at work, I
used to have dual head configuration, but unfortunately, for this card
it requires nvidia's binary drivers.

Ok, it is not so unstable, but, by exprerience, some application make
it crash, I, sometimes, have problem with mplayer, it forbid the use
of a VESA console, it doesn't do well with ACPI and hyperthreading
(simply crash the system ... totaly), it's not thread safe and from my
own tests, acceleration is not so fast.

I have no use for 3D acceleration (or maybe just for xscreensaver ;)
but some other features require the driver, so it's lake of
stability is realy a big issue for every day use.

Of course nvidia have good reason for that binary only driver, they
don't own totaly their libGL (there're big parts from SGI in it.)
Since about half of the good performances come from algorithm in libGL
(a GPUs, or every other hardware acceleration devices, only provide
primitive operations, this operations maybe fast, one still need to
combine them cleverly in order to have good perfs), openning it is,
somehow, out of question (in fact, the real break comes from SGI, for
that point.)

So, which card ? I haven't test latest ATI, but if open drivers from
Xorg (or XFree) are enough for essential use (no 3D, but acces to the
2 outputs and other features like that) they're maybe the good choice.

my 2c.

-- 
Burelle Marwan,
Equipe Bases de Donnees - LRI
http://www.cduce.org
(burelle at lri.fr | Marwan.Burelle at ens.fr)
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