Video card for FreeBSD 64 bit?

You buy the company and release the source and documents. Full support will then come soon after, on all architectures and OSes, especially if you command your staff to answer queries from x.org in a timely manner.

If you don't have 4 or 5 billion to spend, then you are out of luck. Nvidia might have a binary of the usual quality soon, but ATI is the best choice based on what we have at the moment.
 
I think Intel opened up quite a bit for open source Linux driver development for their 3D graphics chipsets. There's certainly a website dedicated to it. I don't know how well this has carried across to FreeBSD, but it might be worth looking into.
 
At this point, intel is not a great choice. They fund development of open source drivers for linux, but the code is very linux specific. Their developers regularly break the mesa/libdrm builds for other operating systems and, at this point, newer versions of the 2D driver won't work till the memory manager in the intel DRM is ported over to FreeBSD.

rnoland@ (the FreeBSD ports maintainer) has had more luck with the codebase for the ATI drivers. All r1xx through r7xx cards (up to the HD4950) have 2D and 3D acceleration. The 3D acceleration is brand new and somewhat experimental for r6xx/r7xx cards, and requires building various components from git. r1xx through r5xx is more stable. They are all certainly functional enough to run compiz and play games such as openarena, nexuiz, and neverball. The linux compat layer is missing something, though, so the only way to accelerate 3D linux applications is via indirect rendering. This works for the most part, but is not ideal.

In comparison to the open source drivers on linux, the ones on FreeBSD are missing KMS, DRI2, and gallium3d. rnoland has started on KMS (which should hopefully bring along the latter two) but it's non-trivial work and he hasn't much time to work on it yet. g3d is not really usable, even on linux.

And, yes, once nvidia releases AMD64 drivers for FreeBSD, there is no doubt that they will be faster and more fully featured than the open source drivers for ATI/AMD cards. Supposedly they will also properly support linux applications, too.
 
adamk said:
And, yes, once nvidia releases AMD64 drivers for FreeBSD, there is no doubt that they will be faster and more fully featured than the open source drivers for ATI/AMD cards. Supposedly they will also properly support linux applications, too.
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That is a hopeful assumption. I have the opposite hopeful assumption.
 
I think it's a safe assumption. The FreeBSD/i386 nvidia drivers are certainly faster and more fully featured than the open source drivers for ATI/AMD cards. The Linux/amd64 and i386 drivers are definitely faster and more fully featured that those open source drivers for ATI/AMD cards. While it would not surprise me if the nvidia drivers are less stable than those open source drivers, it would greatly surprise me if those open source drivers performed better.
 
Too bad that the nvidia i386 blob still requires compat5. Wondering what they'll do with the amd64 version. Are the kernel tweaks that were necessary backported, or are they only in FreeBSD 8?
 
DutchDaemon said:
Too bad that the nvidia i386 blob still requires compat5.
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I suspect they're going to drop that and bring it all up to FreeBSD 6 or 7 ABI. No point keeping 5.x ABI when FreeBSD 5 has been discontinued for a while now. The compat stuff only existed so that the driver could work on many FreeBSD versions...
 
I think FreeBSD 8 got improved device mmap() extensions. This will all implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for 64 bit systems.
 
AFAIK the functions needed for the 64bit Nvidia driver have been MFC'd into RELENG_7.

So the 'new', soon to be released, NVidia drivers will only support RELENG_7 and RELENG_8.
 
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