GeForce FX 5800 Ultra with Nvidia Drivers on 5.2

[Doug Poland]

On Tue, Apr 13, 2004 at 03:04:03PM +0100, Shaun Friedle wrote:
> Hi,
> I am having trouble using my FX 5800 Ultra with the FreeBSD Nvidia
> driver, which I installed from the ports collection. If I try to use the
> Nvidia driver when I start X I get a garbled screen with a few letters
> and symbols (like the smiley face) and some blocks of flashing colour,
> but mostly just a grey pattern character. The machine does not respond
> to input at this point, I have to hard restart the machine because
> Ctrl+Alt+Backspace (or Delete) do nothing.
> 
I found this site to be useful: 

  http://www.soulwax.net/nvidia/

Especially the "Do This First" section.  I had the same problem until I
disabled ACPI.

For the record, I've got a GeForce4 Ti 4200 running dual-head under
5.2.1-RELEASE.  I boot with ACPI disabled (Option #2) and load the
driver via /boot/loader.conf (nvidia_load="YES").  I built a custom
kernel but can't tell you if that was required as I did that before
disabling ACPI.

On another box, I've got an FX 5700 Ultra that does NOT work.  On this
machine I'm running XFree86-4-Server-snap cause I read somewhere that
the nv driver for the 5700 will not work on XFree86-FontServer-4.3.0_3.
This machine is running 5.2-CURRENT with a custom kernel.
Unfortunately, I cannot disable ACPI on this ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe board
as the kernel dumps on errors 9 every time.  

So for me, ACPI was the key.  If I could just get this bloody ASUS board
to boot without ACPI I think I'd be in business.

Good luck to you and I'd appreciate any info you have if successful.

-- 
Regards,
Doug