Best nVidia card for Xorg on FreeBSD?

[Jonathan Chen]

On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:04:40PM +0100, 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.

Heh. I was just thinking about going the other way. One of the main
problems with the nVidia on X is that the xorg-nvidia driver is very
basic; this can be demonstrated by going to a Javascript heavy page (eg
http://www.xwiki.org) using firefox. The X-server just slows to crawl
when trying to scroll the site. The behaviour is not exhibited with
xorg-intel driver, as a counter-example.

Support for the nVidia on FreeBSD from the vendor is also incomplete:
  http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-June/016995.html
The feature request from nVidia appears to have stalled for the time
being (more correctly: I couldn't locate news on any updates to on the
'Net).

In short, nVidia cards are usable, but performance can be exceptionally
bad.

Cheers.
-- 
Jonathan Chen <jonc at chen.org.nz>
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