Your opinion before I try installing?

brigzzy

brigzzy

Hi All,

My apologies if this is not the correct forum for this, bug since it's video card/Xorg related, it seemed logical.

I have been running FreeBSD on my VMware server for a few months now, acting as my primary web server, and I love it. So much in fact that I'm thinking about installing it on my desktop, replacing my Ubuntu Linux partition. My only concern is my video card configuration. I have 2 Radeon HD 6670, and 4 monitors. My video performance in Linux is not great, but it is usable. From a bit of the reading I've been doing it seems that ATI/AMD support for FreeBSD is not the greatest.

Has anyone else had any experience with a setup like this? Should I expect a lot of trouble with this setup? Is it even worth the attempt?

Thanks for reading!

Brigzzy
 
ATI/AMD support is fine, but only for the older UMS mode of the radeon driver. Cards newer than the 4000 series need the KMS driver, and an adapted version of it has not even been started yet.
 
Thank you for your reply :)

When you say that an adapted version has not been started yet, do you mean adapted for FreeBSD, or adapted for my specific model of card?
 
There's been very good work done on the KMS driver for Intel video. That work also provides a start for the Radeon driver, but that hasn't started yet. So at present, we've only got the UMS driver, and acceleration only for Radeon cards up to the 4000-series. vesa should work on later cards. It's better than nothing, but won't do much.
 
Alrighty, sounds good :)

Thanks for your input, just one more question: I sometimes like to watch videos on my PC, do you think the vesa driver will play them alright, or is that dependant on things like the file type, etc.

Thanks again :)

Brigzzy
 
Well, first, the vesa driver will be limited to vesa resolutions. If you have monitors that have native resolutions at 1440x900, 1600x900, 1680x1050, etc., your display is going to look a little off. The vesa driver will support, at most, one monitor per video card, but I also suspect it will only drive one video card at a time.

Whether or not you can watch videos depends on the resolution of the video. In general, I would say that HD videos are going to be pretty unwatchable, especially if you're doing anything else at the same time the video is being played.
 
Currently FreeBSD supports up to ATI HD4000 series graphics card with the open source driver. If you are serious about doing some 3D graphics on FreeBSD, Nvidia graphics cards are the only solution with its proprietary binary blob driver.
 
Thank you both for answering my question. Looks like I'll have to stick with FreeBSD on my virtual servers for now. Oh well.

Thanks!

Brigzzy
 
Hi, I have an ATI unsupported (by now) card in my laptop and I am using the vesa driver. All works fine, I am using Xfce with 1920x1024 resolution and I can see movies (avi, mp4, wmv) with mplayer (no Xv support) pretty well also. It seems to me that the card is so good that even with the good old vesa driver works fine. My card is FirePro M5950.

cheers
marcelo
 
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