NVidia or ATI?

ATI published specs, and everyone assumes that quality drivers will write themselves, because anyone can, if they need to, right?
Practice shows it's not that easy - proper support (good performance, 2d/3d acceleration, video decoding, etc.) for modern cards is pretty much nonexistent, open specs or not, and has been since forever.

You need to choose depending on what your needs are. If you need to actually take full advantage of a 100+ bucks card on FreeBSD, get an NVidia card.

I'd rather depend on a vendor that more or less has proved support for this platform by actually shipping and maintaining decent code (for most of the time), than to rely on some open specs and hope.
Specifications alone will not accelerate your 3d effects or decode your bluray movie ;)
 
G4 said:
ATI published specs, and everyone assumes that quality drivers will write themselves, because anyone can, if they need to, right?
Practice shows it's not that easy -

Which is why AMD also (directly and indirectly) pays developers to work on the open source drivers.

proper support (good performance, 2d/3d acceleration, video decoding, etc.) for modern cards is pretty much nonexistent, open specs or not, and has been since forever.

While that's true about video decoding, excellent 2D acceleration has been available, in FreeBSD, on all radeons up to and including the HD4950 for quite a while now. Decent 3D acceleration has been available for a fair while, too. The open source drivers also support acceleration on the HD5xxx cards now, but no one has ported that to FreeBSD.

Specifications alone will not accelerate your 3d effects or decode your bluray movie ;)

My 3D effects work just fine, thank you very much.

Adam
 
pkubaj said:
It's kind of OT, but I'm considering buying a notebook with GMA 4500HD. Can you write how it performs on FreeBSD? I have no experience with GMA GPU's other than GMA 500, the unfamous Poulsbo, but it support about nothing whatsoever x(

I have X4500/GM45 in my Dell Latitude E6400 laptop and FreeBSD plays really well with it, for laptops Intel graphics cards are good choice because of low power consumption.
 
adamk said:
Which is why AMD also (directly and indirectly) pays developers to work on the open source drivers.



While that's true about video decoding, excellent 2D acceleration has been available, in FreeBSD, on all radeons up to and including the HD4950 for quite a while now. Decent 3D acceleration has been available for a fair while, too. The open source drivers also support acceleration on the HD5xxx cards now, but no one has ported that to FreeBSD.



My 3D effects work just fine, thank you very much.

Adam

The essential work is done by Novell not AMD.

>but no one has ported that to FreeBSD.

Guess why, "no one" is essentially just one person: Robert Noland. He has to do all the work (Nouveau, DRM, Radeon, Intel, Xorg per se). You see, as I said, FreeBSD graphics is more ore less in a so-so state. FreeBSD is in desperate need for more developers experienced in this area.

Intel drivers are way behind, Radeon is just a matter of time before it is incompatible because of some missing features in FreeBSD kernel.
 
oliverh said:
The essential work is done by Novell not AMD.

The initial radeonhd driver was developed by Novell, contracted by AMD (hence, AMD indirectly paid the developers). I wouldn't consider the radeonhd driver essential, however. Certainly not for a long time.

The work on the r300-r800 driver stack in Mesa, in the radeon DDX, and the kernel DRM is mostly done by RedHat folks, also paid by AMD, with contributions from outside developers and even some work from developers at AMD.

Guess why, "no one" is essentially just one person: Robert Noland. He has to do all the work (Nouveau, DRM, Radeon, Intel, Xorg per se). You see, as I said, FreeBSD graphics is more ore less in a so-so state. FreeBSD is in desperate need for more developers experienced in this area.

Intel drivers are way behind, Radeon is just a matter of time before it is incompatible because of some missing features in FreeBSD kernel.

Absolutely, but it's not even the DRM where things are falling behind. Even Mesa from git doesn't compile without some hacking on the build.

Has anyone even heard from Robert lately?

Adam
 
adamk said:
I've used the same command on both FreeBSD and linux:

[cmd=]xrandr --output DVI-0 --primary[/cmd]
I've had another crack with the radeon driver tonight. The --primary option didn't help, but I did discover the "Primary" xorg.conf option in the Monitor section tonight. This allowed me to reorder displays.

However, now I'm getting [thread=17840]this[/thread]. :)
 
vermaden said:
I have X4500/GM45 in my Dell Latitude E6400 laptop and FreeBSD plays really well with it, for laptops Intel graphics cards are good choice because of low power consumption.


I have a GMA 900 in my desktop, It works pretty well most of the time other than the sluggish 3d performance and occasional xserver crash. Too bad that there seems to be storm clouds over its future hardware :(
 
aragon said:
Has anyone managed to get texture compression working with a recent Radeon card? Apparently there are patent issues with it, but some games need it unfortunately.

No, it just won't work with the HD cards. The r300-r500 generation GPUs now support it properly, but only with the gallium3d driver, which is not available on FreeBSD.

Adam
 
I realize this is a solved post, but I had one question that is relevant to the post. (I think... Being a NOOB I am unsure) I am about to get a Clevo B5130M with HM55 express chipset and Intel GMA iGPU and nVidia GT425M dGPU. Has there been any luck in getting Optimus to work in FreeBSD or will I just be stuck with the iGPU? Also, if I use Windows 7 in a VM will it provide access to the dGPU as it has native Optimus support? Thanks in advance for not roasting me if I should have put this elsewhere... just did not want to create a new thread when this one seemed relevant.
Thanks
 
The nvidia drivers for linux/FreeBSD do not support Optimus. Unless the computer's BIOS has an option to switch between the graphics (which very few Optimus laptops have since it defeats the purpose of Optimus) you will be stuck with the intel GPU.

Also, VMs virtualize their own graphics card, so Windows 7 in a VM would not see either the intel or nvidia GPU, but whatever GPU is being virtualized.

Adam
 
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