NVIDIA or Intel Graphics card for the latest FreeBSD

C

choosy

Hi,

I am about to buy a laptop, probably a Lenovo.
I am wondering which of NVIDIA or Intel Graphics cards are better supported on FreeBSD and with less headaches.

I don't plan to use it for gaming, at most I will watch some movies.

Please let me know what is the state of drivers for each of the two, and your experiences with it.

Thank you for your help
 
There are three options:
1) Intel with recent FreeBSD work to include more recent drivers. This does not include PowerVR based drivers used in some tablets.
2) Straight Nvidia relying on the Upstream vendor to continue support. Code is proprietary. In Linux a reverse engineered nouveau driver is being developed. The nouveau driver is not getting much attention in FreeBSD.
3) Hybrid Intel/Nvidia. The basic idea is to use Intel power/battery savings when video demands are low. This is getting some attention in FreeBSD but is not mainstream.

For what it is worth, I think Intel drivers work fine for video playback, are open source and already have an inteldrm kernel module. The same can be said for radeon graphics.
 
There is a myriad of nVidia hardware out there. My advice is to know what your getting into first. If its a windows based machine run " AIDA64 Extreme v5.20.3400" on it. You can get a fully functional version for a 30 day trial. It will print out and dissect every last digit of hardware hiding inside. I purchased it because it is really worth it. If your buying a Lenovo make sure you get the latest and greatest wifi card cause they're hardware is white listed in bios. It would also be a good idea to know what the current bios version is (AID-A64 Extreme) does that too, and, check Lenovo's site. I would also check the revision level of the mother board. You can also install a working image of the latest FreeBSD version and print out dmesg. If whomever you are purchasing from does not wish to participate, move on.
 
Intel i915kms works for me like a charm.
Graphics integrated with Intel i5 2410M CPU.
I can do some test if You want - just ask for any particular question.
For example Full HD 1920x1080 movie works with mplayer -vo xv without problems, but when going to full screen it have to actually "downscale" due to 13" display in laptop is 1366x768
 
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