State of 3d video, which vendor has best support?

[John Nielsen]

On Monday 08 September 2008, KlaymenDK wrote:
> I'm about to build a new pc, the first in quite a few years. My problem
> is that I can't find out if I should choose a 3D chipset from Intel, Ati,
> or nVidia. What's the state of support, track record, and such for these
> nowadays?

This is becoming a FAQ. You should be able to find some good information in 
a couple of relatively recent threads.

The nutshell summary (in my opinion, from memory) is this:
 nVidia support is good w/ the binary driver on i386. Not available on amd64
 ati support is great for hardware supported by radeon(4x). The manpage has 
a pretty good list. Better support for fancier cards ("hd", etc) is coming 
but not quite all the way there
 intel support is very good. Not quite as many souped-up options but modern 
onboard intel graphics are more than adequate for almost anything, 
including many games.

Personally I would look for Intel gfx in a laptop and a well-supported ATI 
card for a desktop.

> I'm planning to use FreeBSD (duh) mainly as a quad-core, dual-headed,
> desktop workstation, but would very much like to be able to play the
> occasional BZFlag (call me oldschool). Which vendor I choose will affect
> my options for motherboard and (onboard/separate) video, which will
> affect my choice of CPU, and so on. So this seems to be a fundamental
> question, but I can't find an authoritative guide to 3D in FreeBSD.

JN