video card for amd64

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 18 October 2006 10:16, Mike Meyer wrote:
> Yeah, the newest cards aren't supported. That's the R5XXX cards -
> which were introduced about a year ago, *not* three years ago. Of
> course, maybe you're focused on 3d support, which is missing for cards
> using the R3XX and later chips.

3D support is actually quite important for many folks, if you don't need it
you can just use the "vesa" driver with either ATI or Nvidia.

> > > Whether releasing closed-source drivers for a handful of open-source
> > > platforms qualifies as "supporting open source" is another
> > > question. Clearly they're supporting the platform, but that's not
> > > necessarily the same thing.
> > At present the nVidia cards is the only choice for FreeBSD,
> 
> Not if you want to use it on something other than i386. That's why the
> very first question I asked is the important one - what do you want to
> use it for? For what I want it for, ATI is the only choice.
> 
> > no amd64 support but that is FreeBSD's fault not nVidia
> 
> Why is that FreeBSD's fault?

Because our kernel doesn't yet provide all the features the driver needs.
I've added some of them, but mroe stuff is needed.  Nvidia sent out an
e-mail a while back listing the things they need as far as kernel support.
Given their willingness to do a driver and my interactions with both
ATI (in the past) and Nvidia, I'd say that Nvidia supports FreeBSD much
more than ATI at this point.  Note that ATI only opened up their documents
for the older R2xx cards under an NDA to developers working for a company
that was under contract to develop a driver, not out of the goodness of their 
heart.  To my knowledge, Nvidia is not providing a FreeBSD driver due to a 
commercial contract, but closer to "out of the goodness of their heart."

-- 
John Baldwin