Strange graphics issues on G5 with NVIDIA 6600

[Jason Bacon]

Yeah, ppc works remarkably well with FreeBSD.  If we just had Firefox 
and Thunderbird, I could actually use my iMac G5 for my daily work routine.

The nv driver is deprecated and gets very little attention these days.  
You might be better off swapping in a Radeon card.  Not sure which one 
would work well with ppc.  The one in my PowerMac G5 only seems to 
support 640x480 under FreeBSD 12.1.

Have fun...

     JB

On 1/11/21 12:09 AM, Julio Merino wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> It has been a long time since I touched FreeBSD last... but I recently got
> a PowerMac G5 (because!) and FreeBSD seems to be the only reasonable choice
> these days for such a machine. So... I'm back here :)
>
> First of all, and to be honest, everything has worked better than expected.
> I could get the system installed without trouble and I've been surprised to
> see that there are now pre-built binary packages for powerpc64 available
> out of the box! A very nice surprise. Last time I tried this on a similar
> machine 7 years ago, I remember having to build a ton of stuff from
> scratch, which wasn't fun...
>
> So... I have installed X.org and, on the first attempt to run it, I got the
> following video output:
>
> https://photos.app.goo.gl/R1bx4FCRD7aRKG9x9
>
> Note that the colors are all off and that half of the screen is "strange":
> the background is split in two colors. This picked up the scfb driver.
>
> This machine comes with an NVIDIA 6600, so I manually installed
> xf86-driver-nv to give it another try. With the nv driver, I got this:
>
> https://photos.app.goo.gl/U7Yx3zs2YfND25ks7
>
> In this case, the colors are good and things mostly work... but note that
> the background problem is still there. And if I maximize something like
> xterm, the same thing happens: the top of the window has the right white
> color, but more than half is black and has some rendering artifacts:
>
> https://photos.app.goo.gl/kWacbVNXAB8cpqHJ9
>
> Lastly, with the nv driver, when I exit Xorg I'm left with a console with
> extremely faint text. There is no brightness.
>
> Here is the X.org startup log: https://pastebin.com/srgPiUiu
>
> Any thoughts or things I could try? I remember the other machine I had
> years ago had this same card and gave me some trouble too, because I
> remember buying a Radeon to replace it. Maybe I should do the same thing
> now? :-/
>
> Thank you!
>


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