Graphics card recommendation

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009, cpghost wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 10:55:05AM -0600, Warren Block wrote:
>> On Wed, 14 Oct 2009, jgrosch at es.net wrote:
>>> nVidia support on i386 FreeBSD is not much better. One can use an nVidia
>>> card with 7.1 but under 7.2 one hits the dreaded mtrr error. A Google
>>> search finds many posts on how to fix this but none of them seem to work.
>>> I could be wrong but nVidia does not seem to be very interested in working
>>> with the FreeBSD project to address these problems. ATI also seems to have
>>> a problem with mtrr under 7.2. I'm still trying to sort this out. I hope
>>> 8.0 will address these problems.
>>
>> All of my cards are ATI and I don't know of the "mtrr" problem you're
>> talking about.  This X1650 works fine on i386 with both 7-STABLE and
>> 8-STABLE.
>
> Try starting X with DRI, then quit X, and restart X again. If you
> don't have DRI anymore, chances are you've hit the ominous MTRR
> problem.

I do that all the time without noticeable problems, but then this 
particular card is an RV530 or RV560 chipset which has been supported 
for quite a while.  Most or all of the Radeon HD cards are R600 or R700 
chipsets, and that's still work in process.

> I seem to have this problem with an ATI HD 3200, using the radeonhd
> driver under RELENG_7. It's pretty annoying, that if X crashes (or
> you have to stop it for some reason), you only get DRI support again
> after rebooting. :-(

Plain radeon driver from xf86-video-ati works best here, although I 
haven't tried radeonhd for a while.

> Having said this, IMHO ATI will probably be better supported in the
> long run on FreeBSD, because they have released the specs of rather
> recent chipsets, while nVidia has not (AFAIK).

Agreed.

-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA