the age old 3D hardware question

[Roland Smith]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 08:48:58AM +0100, xorquewasp at googlemail.com wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I'm looking to buy a new workstation that needs to be able to run in
> 64-bit (long) mode (working with large data sets). What are my options
> for 3D acceleration without binary drivers? My needs are quite minimal,
> I'm not running any games.
> 
> As far as I can tell, only onboard Intel graphics and some ATI cards can
> provide acceleration without blobs. Is this really the case?

Yes. Intel should work with a recent driver and drm components in the
kernel.

Recent ATI cards (R600) work in 2D only. 3D support for R5XX ATI chips should
work in the X driver, but you might need recent patches from Robert Noland
for the DRM component in the kernel. 3D support for R600 based cards is
waiting on specs to be provided by ATI.
 
Check out http://www.phoronix.com/ for news about display drivers etc.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
[plain text _non-HTML_ PGP/GnuPG encrypted/signed email much appreciated]
pgp: 1A2B 477F 9970 BA3C 2914  B7CE 1277 EFB0 C321 A725 (KeyID: C321A725)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20081025/ba7ebc18/attachment.pgp