NVidia or ATI?

I know this has been discussed many times before, but I was wondering if there have been any recent developments? I'm going to build my new box, and I'm trying to decide whether I want to go ATI or nVidia for the video card... ATI would be better because the motherboard I'm planning on getting has CrossXFire support so I can use multiple cards but from what I know there's not really any 3d accelleration in FreeBSD for ATI. So...

1) Is there any 3D acceleration? Or even 2d?

2) Is nVidia's acceleration better?

3 What is the status on the binary drivers for either? Are there any plans from ATI for one?
 
ikbendeman said:
1) Is there any 3D acceleration? Or even 2d?
I cannot comment on the ATI driver but the standard Nvidia nv xorg driver (x11-drivers/xf86-video-nv) only supports 2D acceleration. The binary nvidia driver (x11/nvidia-driver) supports both 3D and 2D acceleration.

2) Is nVidia's acceleration better?
For the binary drivers, yes.

3 What is the status on the binary drivers for either? Are there any plans from ATI for one?
There are no binary drivers for ATI, no plans for FreeBSD support either. The ones from NVidia are regularly updated and have good support.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=47


Personally I'm sticking to NVidia. I don't mind a "binary blob" as long as it does what it's supposed to do.
 
ATI support for FreeBSD is poor, there is probably an open source driver but no official support as far as I know, My laptop has Nvidia and it works great, OpenGL performance is excellent. Intel is the middle of the two, stuff runs reasonably well, but OpenGL performance is pretty bad and I think it has something to do with "failed to initialize GEM" that comes up whenever I load xscreensaver-demo with a terminal emulator program.
 
Choose nvidia if you can live with the blob.
 
There is 2D and 3D acceleration for all radeons, up to and including the Radeon HD4950. The 3D acceleration is good enough to play nexuiz, openarena, neverball, and even ut2004 or (on lighter settings) doom3 on i386. They all work fine with my x850 and higher (though with HD cards, for linux apps, you need to grab the linux driver from somewhere). HD5xxx cards provide modesetting, but no acceleration. 2D and 3D acceleration was added to the open source driver under linux recently, but it will undoubtedly require changes to the radeon DRM on FreeBSD.

Crossfire is not supported. Only one video card will actually work.

Intel is not between the two. It is definitely worse than the ATI support, especially as Intel has basically made it impossible to run newer versions of their driver on FreeBSD.
 
Intel doesn't provide quality drivers for Linux or FreeBSD. I'm not sure who to blame here, intel or xorg. My tendency is to blame intel as AMD and NVIDIA both seem to be able to provide working drivers.

AMD has released significant source code and the drivers are good. I've tried the two main ones with Fedora, radeon and radeonhd, and they both work without crashing the system when tweaked properly. I've had problems with the ATI binary driver in the past and don't expect to use them in the future as they have tossed support for old chipsets out. The open source drivers give at least 50% of the performance of the closed source.

I've had some problems with the nvidia binary drivers recently as they don't support the older chipsets on newer kernels and newer versions of Xorg. In the past the nvidia binary driver caused system instability but I haven't seen that recently. The nouveau driver isn't anywhere near the binary blob in terms of performance and if you need to use an nvidia card I suggest the blob.
 
zspider said:
ATI support for FreeBSD is poor, there is probably an open source driver but no official support as far as I know,

Let's be precise about what support is available:

AMD has released programming information for most older cards and now is releasing information for newer cards. There's a good open-source driver (including 2D and 3D), and no vendor driver for FreeBSD at all. The vendor-supplied driver on Linux isn't supposed to be so hot.

nVidia doesn't release programming information. There's a weak open-source driver and good vendor-supplied binary drivers, currently including FreeBSD 8. Users are almost entirely at the mercy of the vendor for drivers.

Some people like the 3D performance of the nVidia cards, some like the open drivers for AMD.
 
Ati (free) drivers are good, but far from lightning-fast. So nVidia is the weapon of choice for _any_ free operating system. ATI blob in Linux is just a major pain in the back.

To get some decent performance with ATI cards and free drivers, you have to buy some really fast card. But then you have to live with a high power consumption. With nVidia you don't get just lots of 3D performance, but video acceleration and GPU computing horse power. If you buy some ATI card to use it in Linux/FreeBSD you certainly have too much money.
 
Sure,most people using those free drivers either have some old or cheap "office-card" or they have no choice at all, if they're using some mobile device. Apart from that, even the free ATI driver is a dead end in the near future, because there is no GEM or KMS support in FreeBSD. Even now, the driver is slow compared to Linux counterpart. "It's free" a la Stallman is sometimes just PITA.
 
Conversely, sometimes proprietary is just a PITA, especially when you experience things like complete system lockups any time you run any opengl application. I stopped using nvidia when started happening and I couldn't get any helpful response from them.

Adam
 
>sometimes proprietary is just a PITA

Usually I don't deny that, but if it comes to 3D etc. in FreeBSD it's quiet a different story. I stopped using nVidia, tried Intel and ATI. Intel is now PITA too, with ATI it's so-so, so back to nVidia.
 
oliverh said:
>sometimes proprietary is just a PITA

Usually I don't deny that, but if it comes to 3D etc. in FreeBSD it's quiet a different story.

I'm happy they work properly for you. That's certainly not the case for me.

Adam
 
zspider said:
I think it has something to do with "failed to initialize GEM" that comes up...

I believe I had the same problem when coding with OpenGL for university.

The solution I fould was adding an environmental variable something like NO_INDIRECT_RENDERING (It took me a long time to find and I seem to have forgotten the exact name). Once I set this, I got an immediate boost in FPS.

Does anyone know the the env var that I am talking about?

EDIT: I believe it could be this LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

So...
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 ./opengl_application

Found here http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-2578.html
 
adamk said:
I'm happy they work properly for you. That's certainly not the case for me.

Adam

The question was nVidia or ATI, he also mentioned Crossfire for multiple cards, so the goal is _performance_, lots of it. There is just no use for anything different than nVidia in _this_ context. If my goal is _performance, than I don't care for brands or "freedom" in a golden cage. Apart from that, I'm using ATI on my Sony laptop, nVidia and Intel on my desktop machines. I need real 3D performance for my work, so even if there are some minor problens with the nVidia drivers, there is just nothing comparable to it. You have a choice if 3D is more an obsolete feature for you, than of any real use.
 
oliverh said:
The question was nVidia or ATI, he also mentioned Crossfire for multiple cards, so the goal is _performance_, lots of it.

You may be reading a bit more into it than was intended, since the very same post also questions whether there was even 2D acceleration (there is).
 
oliverh said:
Sure,most people using those free drivers either have some old or cheap "office-card" or they have no choice at all, if they're using some mobile device. Apart from that, even the free ATI driver is a dead end in the near future, because there is no GEM or KMS support in FreeBSD. Even now, the driver is slow compared to Linux counterpart. "It's free" a la Stallman is sometimes just PITA.

Hence why its not a good idea to invest in ATI if you are going to use anything other than Windows. Either Intel Or Nvidia, yes intels drivers arent the best they could definently be better but they are good enough to do most things


kpedersen said:
I believe I had the same problem when coding with OpenGL for university.

The solution I fould was adding an environmental variable something like NO_INDIRECT_RENDERING (It took me a long time to find and I seem to have forgotten the exact name). Once I set this, I got an immediate boost in FPS.

Does anyone know the the env var that I am talking about?

EDIT: I believe it could be this LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

So...
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 ./opengl_application

Found here http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-2578.html

well the failed to to initialize GEM error stopped coming up when I run xscreensaver-demo as they describe in the article, Thanks ;) Might of even slightly increased the performance.
 
zspider said:
Hence why its not a good idea to invest in ATI if you are going to use anything other than Windows. Either Intel Or Nvidia, yes intels drivers arent the best they could definently be better but they are good enough to do most things

The latest Intel drivers don't run at all on FreeBSD, for the very same reasons you say to avoid ATI--which does run on FreeBSD. So this logic is a bit hard to follow.
 
Frankly, the need/desire for Crossfire/SLI on FreeBSD confounds me in the first place. Are there really that many (or any) applications that would benefit from more than one GPU in the first place?

Adam
 
wblock said:
The latest Intel drivers don't run at all on FreeBSD, for the very same reasons you say to avoid ATI--which does run on FreeBSD. So this logic is a bit hard to follow.


I cant justify buying an ATI card just for FreeBSD either especially if its a "dead-end" as someone mentioned earlier.
 
And I can't justify buying a card from a company that doesn't provide 3D specifications and make an effort to also provide open source drivers.

Adam
 
There are many applications for processing on the GPU. Right now technologies like nvidia's CUDA and ati stream are not available on FreeBSD. That may become a serious issue in the future when servers have multiple GPUs in addition to multiple cores.
 
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