Nvidia graphics on AMD64

[Mike Clarke]

After running a 90 hour portupgrade job on my current Duron 1600 based system 
I've persuaded myself that a hardware upgrade is due.

I'm contemplating building a system around an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ CPU. I'm not 
into games and overclocking so a relatively low end motherboard with 
integrated graphics should suffice. I've been looking at a few specs, many of 
them use Nvidia chipsets and I understand that there isn't a Nvidia graphics 
driver for FreeBSD on the AMD64 platform.

If I choose a Nvidia based motherboard would I have to install the i386 
version of FreeBSD if I wanted to use the onboard graphics, in which case to 
what extent would the overall performance suffer?

My graphics needs are fairly modest, so long as I can use the Gimp to edit 
some photos I'm OK, but playing the occasional DVD fairly smoothly would be a 
bonus but not essential. Is there any alternative graphics driver which would 
meet my needs?

... or should I just keep away from Nvidia and concentrate on something with 
ATI graphics?

-- 
Mike Clarke