X.org 6.9 doesn't work with NVidia 7800 GTX (fwd)

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith]

Mike O'Brien wrote:
>     I sent this to "freebsd-x11" and didn't hear a peep back,
> so I'm widening the net.
> 
>     I'm running FreeBSD 6-STABLE, cvsupped as of last night.  I upgraded
> the ports collection to X.org 6.9 at the same time.  Under the X
> that ships with 6-RELEASE, in the ISO image, and under X.org 6.9,
> the symptoms are the same.
> 
>     The hardware is an Athlon 4400+ CPU on an Asus motherboard and an
> NVIDIA 7800 GTX video card.
> 
>     I'm not running the NVidia FreeBSD driver (yet), preferring to see
> the VESA work first before stirring the pot.  If I run X -probeonly,
> I get a message that "module fbdev cannot be found".  This message
> is, however, almost unreadable because the probing of the video
> card causes the console contrast to drop almost to zero.  The room
> has to be almost pitch-black before the remaining dim text can be
> read.  I have to reboot the machine to make the console brightness
> and contrast normal again.
> 
>     Any takers on either of these problems?
> 
> Mike O'Brien

It might be worth trying the nvidia drivers even if VESA isn't working. 
  My personal experience with the very recent FreeBSD nvidia drivers is 
that they are awesome.