Which graphics cards work well with FreeBSD 13?

Is there any documentation on which vendors use open source drivers, vs proprietary ones? Particularly where the vendors contribute to the open source ones.

This thread is the only place I’ve seen this info. The graphics wiki page doesn’t mention this idea as far as I can tell.

It sounds like AMD and Intel integrated graphics are a safe bet because of open source drivers, and nvidia might be more risky because they’re proprietary and less likely to stay updated?
 
SirDice said:
I'm wondering about the new Intel ARC video cards. They look very interesting, on paper at least.

With regards to AMD/Radeon or Intel graphics drivers everything more or less depends on what's supported by the Linux DRM code. If it's not supported there it certainly won't be supported on FreeBSD.
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Intel ARC drivers are terribad even for Windows systems. I wouldn't hold my breath running them on FreeBSD.
 
patmaddox said:
Is there any documentation on which vendors use open source drivers, vs proprietary ones? Particularly where the vendors contribute to the open source ones.
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It's a very short list nowadays. Only Intel, AMD and NVidia. NVidia's driver never was open source, although that might change some time in the future. Only Intel and AMD have something open source with regards to graphic card drivers.
 
Not sure about your first question, I think Intel may contribute to open source drivers. AMD I'm not even going to guess.

Nvidia: they seem to be staying reasonably up to date, but you have to be aware of your hardware version because they will drop support for older hardware from the current version of the drivers. That's why if you do "pkg search nvidia | grep driver" you see 5 different versions of the driver plus a couple for a secondary device.
 
patmaddox said:
It sounds like AMD and Intel integrated graphics are a safe bet because of open source drivers, and nvidia might be more risky because they’re proprietary and less likely to stay updated?
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The ranking is: Nvdia >> Amd > Intel for gaming, Nvidia for computing and Whatever for basic 2d graphics. Nvidia generally has the most up-to-date driver, because they work on FreeBSD compatibility directly. Intel and AMD work on the GPU drivers in the Linux kernel and don't really help with porting them to FreeBSD.
 
I am trying to build a desktop machine for programming, not for gaming, so I’m looking for graphics that “just work” (and will keep working) with a minimum of hassle. As long as I can launch a desktop environment, run emacs, and a web browser with a couple hundred open tabs, I’m good to go.

I’m currently looking at Intel i71100b CPU w/ integrated graphics. I think I’ve done as much research as I can at this point, and just have to cross my fingers and hope it works.
 
patmaddox said:
I am trying to build a desktop machine for programming, not for gaming, so I’m looking for graphics that “just work” (and will keep working) with a minimum of hassle.
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Low bar :) but a good one. For that integrated Intel graphics using the modesetting drivers in 13.x should be fine. I've been doing that on a NUC for a while, works nicely, so for your requirements it should be good.
 
mer said:
For that integrated Intel graphics using the modesetting drivers in 13.x should be fine.
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Yeah, I agree. Get a mainboard (and CPU) with integrated graphics. Then you can always 'upgrade' your graphics by sticking a 'real' graphics card in it some time in the future. Up to 11th gen Intel should work fine, not sure about the 12th gen though. Besides the graphics there may also be an issue with the P and E core differences. As far as I know the FreeBSD process scheduler doesn't understand the difference and will treat them all the same.
 
SirDice said:
Up to 11th gen Intel should work fine, not sure about the 12th gen though.
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I've always had better luck picking "latest gen - [1|2]" hardware for FreeBSD. My needs have never demanded bleeding edge, heck the system idle stats say I'm not doing anything. I'll take more memory over pure cpu for my workloads any day.
 
patmaddox said:
The Intel graphics page, at least, is not current (it even says the table is obsolete). Even the note about Linux 5.4 is not current. drm-510-kmod is the current version, so whatever Linux kernel 5.10 supports should also work on 13.1.
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I got RX 6900 XT going under FreeBSD :p
forums.freebsd.org

sienna_cichlid driver

Discussion: Last year, I got a water-cooled RX 6900 XT GPU (Yeah, worst possible time to get it, at height of GPU shortage, but deed is done 😅 ). Spent some time mating it to an aftermarket cooling system, and it's finally working under Windows, and the hardware is fine, I can use the latest AMD...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
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