Nvidia graphics on AMD64

[Mel]

On Saturday 02 February 2008 23:13:25 Wojciech Puchar wrote:
> > After running a 90 hour portupgrade job on my current Duron 1600 based
> > system I've persuaded myself that a hardware upgrade is due.
>
> simply use precompiled ones if it's a problem.
> anyway - i don't what bloatware you have compiled but on my 1200Mhz
> Thinkpad i needed few hours to install things i use.
>
> > 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.
>
> by general there are lots of problems with nvidia as it's closed source.
> i always avoid closed source.

That's a very unfounded statement.

Nvidia is probably the best supported graphics card family for FreeBSD, 
*because* it actually has a vendor provided driver. The only 'problem' is 
that Nvidia decides when they want to support platform/release X/Y and 
FreeBSD to have certain interfaces they desire in place.
Last I heard, it was 7.0-RELEASE for new (as in, not COMPAT5X) native drivers, 
but this long topic seems to indicate otherwise:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=41545

There is however for X an nv driver from xorg that does it's job for most 
cards, if you don't need hardware accelerated OpenGL. Which OP doesn't need 
for gimp/dvd's.

I'd really stay away from ATI, for your purposes, either go with nvidia or 
Intel onboard.
-- 
Mel