Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?
Manolis Kiagias
sonicy at otenet.gr
Sun May 25 22:20:10 UTC 2008
Mark Ovens wrote:
> Currently using a Radeon 8500LE but since u/g to xorg 7.3 I've had
> nothing but trouble with X hanging/crashing/locking-up.
>
> From what I've read, the state of the radeon drivers leaves much to be
> desired and although some people seem to have trouble with nVidia
> cards they appear to be a better choice.
>
> So, after over a decade of brand-loyalty to ATI (when I started with
> FreeBSD back in the mid-90's ATI cards were the only ones I could find
> that would run X at better than VGA resolution) I'm going to switch to
> nVidia.
>
> The machine is FreeBSD-only so no issues with Windows drivers and
> performance etc. (I divorced the Evil Empire a couple of years ago)
> and my Radeon 8500 is adequate for my needs so I don't need a high-end
> card.
>
> I'm looking on eBay and an FX5x00 card seems to fit the bill.
>
> So, are there any particular cards that work well under Xorg/FreeBSD
> or, more importantly, any that don't?
>
> Any advice about the need to consider 3D issues would be welcome? I
> run KDE and mainly use digikam/GIMP for digital photo editing and
> kmplayer for viewing videos. I believe there is a 3D interface for KDE
> (CompuViz?) - is this worth bothering with?
>
> All help/advice gratefully received.
>
> TIA
>
> Mark
>
Don't know about CompuViz, but if you would like to try compiz fusion,
I am a bit tempted to point you to this article (maybe because I am the
author :)
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/compiz-fusion/
This will answer your questions on installing nvidia drivers and also
getting 3D effects and compiz-fusion to work.
Note that there is no nvidia-supplied (read: proprietary) driver for the
64bit version of FreeBSD. The community 'nvidia' driver works fine,
although no 3D and 2D performance is somewhat limited. I've used a
number of cards with FreeBSD (7300GT, 7300Go (laptop), 6600GT, 6200)
and never had problems.
The FX series should also work, but why not buying a newer card? You can
get new entry-level nvidia cards for very little money.
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