# Using an Nvidia Card with newcons.



## protocelt (Jun 2, 2014)

I have been using an Nvidia card on my FreeBSD 10-STABLE workstation with syscons() for quite some time now. It has and still works fine. I am curious to know if anyone is using newcons with an Nvidia card and if so, does it offer any advantages at this point compared to syscons()? I'm sure it would be easy to try it myself but I won't bother recompiling at this point if it doesn't offer anything compared to syscons() right now. Information seems to be somewhat scarce other than "It works."


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## asteriskRoss (Jun 4, 2014)

As far as I'm aware the principal advantage of Newcons right now is that users who are using a KMS driver can actually have a working console.  One of my laptops has Intel PineView, which works nicely with the KMS Intel driver.  However, on 10.0, this means that I can't switch back to the console.  There is no such issue with Nvidia cards.  In the spirit of "if ain't broken" you _could_ move to the new driver that hasn't been around long enough to make it into a FreeBSD release, or you could stick with the mature console is working fine.  My choice would be the latter but if time isn't an issue for you (and you have backups) why not try it out?


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## protocelt (Jun 4, 2014)

Thanks for your reply @asteriskRoss. I really should have worded the topic better in hindsight. Anyway, for anyone that's also curious, I had some time this morning so rebuilt my kernel. It does in fact work with Nvidia however you get a standard 80x25 console and it is kind of slow. The only advantage I can see at this point of using Newcons with Nvidia would be if you need a console that supports utf-8. As you mentioned, it's still being developed, so I'll wait for development to mature a bit more before switching over.


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