recommended dual-head video cards for amd64?

[O. Hartmann]

Am 02/16/13 15:23, schrieb Arto Pekkanen:
> I heartily recommend nVidia, their drivers work nicely. Dual head is supported. Driver installation is simple, just download, extract, make install. Also you gotta install x11/nvidia-settings, with this tool it is really easy to configure screen layout etc.
> 
> If you do have something against closed sourced drivers then I have no idea what to use except Google.
> 
> On 16 Feb 2013, at 02:42, heasus at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> Hello. I am looking for a dual-head pci-e video card with DVI (or VGA)
>> outputs for amd64.  I do not have extraordinary graphics requirements;
>> I am just looking for one workspace over 1600x1200 dual-heads without
>> driver/Xconfig aggravation.
>>
>> I have found some recommendations on this list for nvidia / GeForce
>> cards, but those posts were all from 2009 or earlier - or I haven't
>> chosen my search terms well. I presume that things have changed a bit
>> since 2009 and that many have dual-head cards on recent motherboards,
>> so I'd like to hear about what works from those using them, please.
>>


My experiences with AMD graphics cards on FreeBSD were horrific (HD4830
worked half way, but froze system, all models below HD48XX, for instance
HD4670 and HD4770 made the system go freeze when leaving desktop or
crashed speonatnously).

AMD does not provide ANY(!) BLOB for their GPUs for FreeBSD, you're
bound to the open source drivers which are not very robust at this
moment for HD6000 boards and as far as I know, the support for HD7000 is
still abyssimal - if it is there. 3D support is a black hole for HD7000.

I use nVidia GTX560Ti, GTX570 and GTX580 on FreeBSD (9.1-STABLE,
10.0-CURRENT, all amd64) by using the nVidia BLOB for 64Bit FreeBSD. As
of this writing, I use the BETA driver 313.18 on all of our boxes
without problems and on one box I was also performing some experiments
with a second and third screen - with no problems for the limited test I
did. On a Dell Laitude 6510E there is also a Quadro 3000M chip, used
with the BLOB from nVidia without problems. Sometimes I have to fiddle
around with the display and VGA outlet for BEAMER driven presentations,
but that is no serious issue.

We also run two TESLA boards sometimes with FreeBSD, using the BLOB
(some 30X.XX driver) for display output.

nVidia doesn't provide any kind of OpenCL or CUDA support in either
32bit or 64bit for FreeBSD, it is just the display driver.

If you look for a working, reliable system with modern hardware, there
is now way passing by nVidia at the moment if you intend to stay with
FreeBSD. My experiences with the OpenSource drivers, both the Noveau and
the Radeon ones, are bad, bad 3D support, flaky and sometimes "frosty".

For any serious desktop or scientific purpose, I recommend a Linux
Flavor due to the fact FreeBSD suffer from not having OpenCL or CUDA
accelerated GPGPU support which becomes dramatically important - even on
desktop systems. Don't confuse "desktop" with gaming rig or something,
most machines we use in the lab are de facto "desktops", acting as
servers AND graphical workstations, some of them are FreeBSD.

Well, for short, buying crappy outdated hardware from AMD or nVidia or
Matrox to match an existing and working opensource driver on FreeBSD
doesn't count in my opinion, it is a waste of money. So - go with nVidia!


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 488 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hardware/attachments/20130216/9a73bd33/attachment.sig>