# NVidia or ATI?



## ikbendeman (Sep 10, 2010)

I know this has been discussed many times before, but I was wondering if there have been any recent developments? I'm going to build my new box, and I'm trying to decide whether I want to go ATI or nVidia for the video card... ATI would be better because the motherboard I'm planning on getting has CrossXFire support so I can use multiple cards but from what I know there's not really any 3d accelleration in FreeBSD for ATI. So...

1) Is there any 3D acceleration? Or even 2d?

2) Is nVidia's acceleration better?

3 What is the status on the binary drivers for either? Are there any plans from ATI for one?


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## User23 (Sep 10, 2010)

Personally i like ATI more. But for 3D support NVIDIA was always the best choice on FreeBSD, i think.


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## SirDice (Sep 10, 2010)

ikbendeman said:
			
		

> 1) Is there any 3D acceleration? Or even 2d?


I cannot comment on the ATI driver but the standard Nvidia nv xorg driver (x11-drivers/xf86-video-nv) only supports 2D acceleration. The binary nvidia driver (x11/nvidia-driver) supports both 3D and 2D acceleration.



> 2) Is nVidia's acceleration better?


For the binary drivers, yes.



> 3 What is the status on the binary drivers for either? Are there any plans from ATI for one?


There are no binary drivers for ATI, no plans for FreeBSD support either. The ones from NVidia are regularly updated and have good support.

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=47


Personally I'm sticking to NVidia. I don't mind a "binary blob" as long as it does what it's supposed to do.


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## zspider (Sep 10, 2010)

ATI support for FreeBSD is poor, there is probably an open source driver but no official support as far as I know, My laptop has Nvidia and it works great, OpenGL performance is excellent. Intel is the middle of the two, stuff runs reasonably well, but OpenGL performance is pretty bad and I think it has something to do with "failed to initialize GEM" that comes up whenever I load xscreensaver-demo with a terminal emulator program.


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## lme@ (Sep 10, 2010)

Choose nvidia if you can live with the blob.


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## adamk (Sep 10, 2010)

There is 2D and 3D acceleration for all radeons, up to and including the Radeon HD4950.  The 3D acceleration is good enough to play nexuiz, openarena, neverball, and even ut2004 or (on lighter settings) doom3 on i386.  They all work fine with my x850 and higher (though with HD cards, for linux apps, you need to grab the linux driver from somewhere). HD5xxx cards provide modesetting, but no acceleration.  2D and 3D acceleration was added to the open source driver under linux recently, but it will undoubtedly require changes to the radeon DRM on FreeBSD.

Crossfire is not supported.  Only one video card will actually work.

Intel is not between the two.  It is definitely worse than the ATI support, especially as Intel has basically made it impossible to run newer versions of their driver on FreeBSD.


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## rusty (Sep 10, 2010)

It's also worth bearing in mind that there's VDPAU for nvidia cards.


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## davidgurvich (Sep 10, 2010)

Intel doesn't provide quality drivers for Linux or FreeBSD.  I'm not sure who to blame here, intel or xorg.  My tendency is to blame intel as AMD and NVIDIA both seem to be able to provide working drivers. 

AMD has released significant source code and the drivers are good.  I've tried the two main ones with Fedora, radeon and radeonhd, and they both work without crashing the system when tweaked properly.  I've had problems with the ATI binary driver in the past and don't expect to use them in the future as they have tossed support for old chipsets out.  The open source drivers give at least 50% of the performance of the closed source.

I've had some problems with the nvidia binary drivers recently as they don't support the older chipsets on newer kernels and newer versions of Xorg. In the past the nvidia binary driver caused system instability but I haven't seen that recently.  The nouveau driver isn't anywhere near the binary blob in terms of performance and if you need to use an nvidia card I suggest the blob.


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## wblock@ (Sep 11, 2010)

zspider said:
			
		

> ATI support for FreeBSD is poor, there is probably an open source driver but no official support as far as I know,



Let's be precise about what support is available:

AMD has released programming information for most older cards and now is releasing information for newer cards.  There's a good open-source driver (including 2D and 3D), and no vendor driver for FreeBSD at all.  The vendor-supplied driver on Linux isn't supposed to be so hot.

nVidia doesn't release programming information.  There's a weak open-source driver and good vendor-supplied binary drivers, currently including FreeBSD 8.  Users are almost entirely at the mercy of the vendor for drivers.

Some people like the 3D performance of the nVidia cards, some like the open drivers for AMD.


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## oliverh (Sep 11, 2010)

Ati (free) drivers are good, but far from lightning-fast. So nVidia is the weapon of choice for _any_ free operating system. ATI blob in Linux is just a major pain in the back. 

To get some decent performance with ATI cards and free drivers, you have to buy some really fast card. But then you have to live with a high power consumption. With nVidia you don't get just lots of 3D performance, but video acceleration and GPU computing horse power. If you buy some ATI card to use it in Linux/FreeBSD you certainly have too much money.


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## adamk (Sep 11, 2010)

oliverh said:
			
		

> If you buy some ATI card to use it in Linux/FreeBSD you certainly have too much money.



Or perhaps you just prefer open source drivers.

Adam


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## oliverh (Sep 11, 2010)

Sure,most people using those free drivers either have some old or cheap "office-card" or they have no choice at all, if they're using some mobile device. Apart from that, even the free ATI driver is a dead end in the near future, because there is no GEM or KMS support in FreeBSD. Even now, the driver is slow compared to Linux counterpart. "It's free" a la Stallman is sometimes just PITA.


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## adamk (Sep 11, 2010)

Conversely, sometimes proprietary is just a PITA, especially when you experience things like complete system lockups any time you run any opengl application.  I stopped using nvidia when started happening and I couldn't get any helpful response from them.

Adam


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## oliverh (Sep 11, 2010)

>sometimes proprietary is just a PITA

Usually I don't deny that, but if it comes to 3D etc. in FreeBSD it's quiet a different story. I stopped using nVidia, tried Intel and ATI. Intel is now PITA too, with ATI it's so-so, so back to nVidia.


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## adamk (Sep 11, 2010)

oliverh said:
			
		

> >sometimes proprietary is just a PITA
> 
> Usually I don't deny that, but if it comes to 3D etc. in FreeBSD it's quiet a different story.



I'm happy they work properly for you.  That's certainly not the case for me.

Adam


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## kpedersen (Sep 11, 2010)

zspider said:
			
		

> I think it has something to do with "failed to initialize GEM" that comes up...



I believe I had the same problem when coding with OpenGL for university.

The solution I fould was adding an environmental variable something like NO_INDIRECT_RENDERING (It took me a long time to find and I seem to have forgotten the exact name). Once I set this, I got an immediate boost in FPS.

Does anyone know the the env var that I am talking about?

EDIT: I believe it could be this LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

So...
LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 ./opengl_application

Found here http://forums.freebsd.org/archive/index.php/t-2578.html


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## oliverh (Sep 12, 2010)

adamk said:
			
		

> I'm happy they work properly for you.  That's certainly not the case for me.
> 
> Adam



The question was nVidia or ATI, he also mentioned Crossfire for multiple cards, so the goal is _performance_, lots of it. There is just no use for anything different than nVidia in _this_ context. If my goal is _performance, than I don't care for brands or "freedom" in a golden cage. Apart from that, I'm using ATI on my Sony laptop, nVidia and Intel on my desktop machines. I need real 3D performance for my work, so even if there are some minor problens with the nVidia drivers, there is just nothing comparable to it. You have a choice if 3D is more an obsolete feature for you, than of any real use.


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## wblock@ (Sep 12, 2010)

oliverh said:
			
		

> The question was nVidia or ATI, he also mentioned Crossfire for multiple cards, so the goal is _performance_, lots of it.



You may be reading a bit more into it than was intended, since the very same post also questions whether there was even 2D acceleration (there is).


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## zspider (Sep 12, 2010)

oliverh said:
			
		

> Sure,most people using those free drivers either have some old or cheap "office-card" or they have no choice at all, if they're using some mobile device. Apart from that, even the free ATI driver is a dead end in the near future, because there is no GEM or KMS support in FreeBSD. Even now, the driver is slow compared to Linux counterpart. "It's free" a la Stallman is sometimes just PITA.



Hence why its not a good idea to invest in ATI if you are going to use anything other than Windows. Either Intel Or Nvidia, yes intels drivers arent the best they could definently be better but they are good enough to do most things




			
				kpedersen said:
			
		

> I believe I had the same problem when coding with OpenGL for university.
> 
> The solution I fould was adding an environmental variable something like NO_INDIRECT_RENDERING (It took me a long time to find and I seem to have forgotten the exact name). Once I set this, I got an immediate boost in FPS.
> 
> ...



well the failed to to initialize  GEM error stopped coming up when I run xscreensaver-demo as they describe in the article, Thanks  Might of even slightly increased the performance.


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## wblock@ (Sep 12, 2010)

zspider said:
			
		

> Hence why its not a good idea to invest in ATI if you are going to use anything other than Windows. Either Intel Or Nvidia, yes intels drivers arent the best they could definently be better but they are good enough to do most things



The latest Intel drivers don't run at all on FreeBSD, for the very same reasons you say to avoid ATI--which does run on FreeBSD.  So this logic is a bit hard to follow.


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## adamk (Sep 12, 2010)

Frankly, the need/desire for Crossfire/SLI on FreeBSD confounds me in the first place.  Are there really that many (or any) applications that would benefit from more than one GPU in the first place?

Adam


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## kpedersen (Sep 13, 2010)

adamk said:
			
		

> Are there really that many (or any) applications that would benefit from more than one GPU in the first place?



Probs not, but it does impress girls


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## zspider (Sep 13, 2010)

wblock said:
			
		

> The latest Intel drivers don't run at all on FreeBSD, for the very same reasons you say to avoid ATI--which does run on FreeBSD.  So this logic is a bit hard to follow.




I cant justify buying an ATI card just for FreeBSD either especially if its a "dead-end" as someone mentioned earlier.


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## adamk (Sep 13, 2010)

And I can't justify buying a card from a company that doesn't provide 3D specifications and make an effort to also provide open source drivers.

Adam


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## davidgurvich (Sep 13, 2010)

There are many applications for processing on the GPU.  Right now technologies like nvidia's CUDA and ati stream are not available on FreeBSD.  That may become a serious issue in the future when servers have multiple GPUs in addition to multiple cores.


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## zspider (Sep 13, 2010)

adamk said:
			
		

> And I can't justify buying a card from a company that doesn't provide 3D specifications and make an effort to also provide open source drivers.
> 
> Adam



likewise. unfortunately intel chipsets are very common and you may not be able to avoid them. I used to be a fan of ATI but when on Linux they totally made a mess of the driver support, it would crash the xserver if you tried to install the driver. found Nvidia to be much more supportive of other platforms. Ultimately Nvidia is the best option people. Now that I am aware of intel not working in the future with FreeBSD I will look for Nvidia instead.

question:
so what will happen if Nvidia decides to drop FreeBSD support by some chance?


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## wblock@ (Sep 13, 2010)

zspider said:
			
		

> likewise. unfortunately intel chipsets are very common and you may not be able to avoid them. I used to be a fan of ATI but when on Linux they totally made a mess of the driver support, it would crash the xserver if you tried to install the driver. found Nvidia to be much more supportive of other platforms. Ultimately Nvidia is the best option people. Now that I am aware of intel not working in the future with FreeBSD I will look for Nvidia instead.



ATI: open driver works now, but might not work with later releases of xorg because FreeBSD doesn't have KMS.  Source is available, so the driver can be updated whether the vendor cares or not.

nVidia: closed driver works now, but might not work with later releases of xorg (sounds like current drivers don't do KMS).  nVidia is under no obligation to release drivers for future FreeBSD versions at all.  Source or programming information not available at all, so updates have to come from the vendor.



> question:
> so what will happen if Nvidia decides to drop FreeBSD support by some chance?



Sort of already happened with the 64-bit nVidia drivers, I think.  Users had to wait, because without programming information, there was nothing else they could do.  As they say, a car with the hood welded shut.


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## zspider (Sep 13, 2010)

wblock said:
			
		

> ATI: open driver works now, but might not work with later releases of xorg because FreeBSD doesn't have KMS.  Source is available, so the driver can be updated whether the vendor cares or not.
> 
> nVidia: closed driver works now, but might not work with later releases of xorg (sounds like current drivers don't do KMS).  nVidia is under no obligation to release drivers for future FreeBSD versions at all.  Source or programming information not available at all, so updates have to come from the vendor.
> 
> ...



 I guess ill have to install that ATI x600 again(I didnt because i was under the impression that it would not work), maybe ill kick ubuntu off the downstairs computer and put FreeBSD on there


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## adamk (Sep 13, 2010)

The x600 should definitely work, with both 2D and 3D acceleration.  You likely won't be able to play doom3 with that GPU, but desktop effects, openarena, nexuiz, neverball, etc. should all be usable.

Adam


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## DutchDaemon (Sep 13, 2010)

For the record: there are up-to-date binary NVIDIA drivers for 64-bit FreeBSD in the ports tree and on NVIDIA's site. 'Officially beta', but proven stable for a long time now.


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## aragon (Sep 13, 2010)

davidgurvich said:
			
		

> Right now technologies like nvidia's CUDA and ati stream are not available on FreeBSD.


http://blogs.freebsdish.org/jhb/2010/07/20/using-cuda-with-the-native-freebsdamd64-nvidia-driver/


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## davidgurvich (Sep 13, 2010)

I'm glad to hear that the linux compatibility is good enough to play with CUDA.  Are there any stats on the performance hit?


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## zspider (Sep 13, 2010)

davidgurvich said:
			
		

> I'm glad to hear that the linux compatibility is good enough to play with CUDA.  Are there any stats on the performance hit?



I can run RTCW at 90 FPS with it, settings all the way up no lag online unfortunately that makes trick jumping difficult though.


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## zspider (Sep 14, 2010)

adamk said:
			
		

> The x600 should definitely work, with both 2D and 3D acceleration.  You likely won't be able to play doom3 with that GPU, but desktop effects, openarena, nexuiz, neverball, etc. should all be usable.
> 
> Adam



Sounds good, if it can run Neverball and all that it should have little difficulty running RTCW or Enemy Territory. Makes me feel better that if I got stuck with an ATI chipset in the future that it would still be able to run FreeBSD and reasonably well. Dont really wish to give up this fine operating system. Thanks for the heads up.


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## adamk (Sep 14, 2010)

Just be aware that, at the present moment, HD5xxx doesn't have acceleration on FreeBSD, and there are issues with direct rendering on linux applications on AMD64.

Adam


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## nakal (Sep 14, 2010)

Most games are not playable on ATI. If you need games, choose NVidia. Especially Linux emulation is broken on FreeBSD with ATI cards.

I still stick to ATI, because the quality of the cards is much higher and I have 2 consoles for playing games. I also like AMD's attitude and support them buying their products.

Earlier I've been testing the 2D-accel code for FreeBSD (libdrm and radeonhd), but a few things have showed me that X.org developers don't give a flying fart about FreeBSD, and even you give them exact hints which lines are faulty and cause kernel panics on FreeBSD, they still ignore you. I don't like this and I'm not testing anymore. They can go to hell with their Linux-centric views.

All in all, I wished there would be more than 1 developer having influence on ATI's Xorg video drivers.


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## adamk (Sep 14, 2010)

nakal said:
			
		

> Most games are not playable on ATI.



That's interesting, because most games I've tried are playable on ATI.



> If you need games, choose NVidia. Especially Linux emulation is broken on FreeBSD with ATI cards.



This is true on AMD64.

Adam


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## aragon (Sep 14, 2010)

My pet peeve with the ATI drivers is that the radeonhd driver has poor 3D acceleration (especially where I need it most, linux emu) and is kinda dead now, but the radeon driver can't reorder its output ports.  A seemingly minor nit, but a big deal for a dual screened pedant like me caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.


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## adamk (Sep 14, 2010)

Why do you need to reorder the output ports?  What does that accomplish that using the --primary option with xrandr doesn't do? (This is not meant sarcastically, I'm really curious).

Adam


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## aragon (Sep 14, 2010)

--primary doesn't work with the radeon driver either. 

Reordering allows me to set my DVI port as primary.  Without it everything defaults to the VGA port where my secondary monitor is connected.


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## adamk (Sep 14, 2010)

aragon said:
			
		

> --primary doesn't work with the radeon driver either.



I use it all the time with my two workstations with radeon GPUs.  By default, X sets my right monitor as the primary in both cases. 

Adam


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## aragon (Sep 15, 2010)

adamk said:
			
		

> I use it all the time with my two workstations with radeon GPUs.  By default, X sets my right monitor as the primary in both cases.


Is the FreeBSD syntax the same as the man page and Linux examples?


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## adamk (Sep 15, 2010)

I've used the same command on both FreeBSD and linux:

[cmd=]xrandr --output DVI-0 --primary[/cmd]

Adam


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## danbi (Sep 15, 2010)

I have never had complaints with the ATI drivers on FreeBSD. I just don't do gaming  (this should explain it, I guess)

But, here are some things, I don't like about the binary nvidia drivers!

- until recently, there was no 64 bit driver. That is, if you have fast 64 bit, multicore CPU, you must run it in 32bit mode to use 'powerful' nVidia card. Nice, eh?

- every time you recompile the kernel with new DRM you must reinstall the nvidia driver. Sometimes this kicks bad.

So yes, if 3D performance is absolutely a must for you and for this purpose you buy the latest and greatest video cards, and you are willing to be extra careful with your system upgrades, by all means go for nVidia.

If not, chances are you are buying an nVidia card, which is comparable to an not top-of-the-line ATI card, for which there is support in the radeonhd driver --- I would go for the ATI card then.

Of course, if you are nVidia or ATI fanboy ... you are asking the wrong question 

PS: Bad experience with Intel drivers..


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## jalla (Sep 15, 2010)

> - until recently, there was no 64 bit driver. That is, if you have fast 64 bit, multicore CPU, you must run it in 32bit mode to use 'powerful' nVidia card. Nice, eh?


This was valid until ~10 months ago. It's no longer an issue.
And there's no need for the quotes in 'powerful'. The nVidia cards are every bit as powerful in 32bit as 64bit environments. You're just limited to 4Gb of ram with the former.


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## ikbendeman (Sep 15, 2010)

Thanks for all the feedback guys! The biggest use for crossfire wouldn't be for just one video-hungry application but for multitasking. Anyways, I'm glad this is all summaried in one place now, and I think I'm going to go with nVidia.


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## adamk (Sep 15, 2010)

SLI, the nvidia technology for linking to video cards, is only of use when rendering a single scene.


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## pkubaj (Sep 15, 2010)

It's kind of OT, but I'm considering buying a notebook with GMA 4500HD. Can you write how it performs on FreeBSD? I have no experience with GMA GPU's other than GMA 500, the unfamous Poulsbo, but it support about nothing whatsoever x(


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## davidgurvich (Sep 16, 2010)

The only thing I can say about intel chipsets is that I will be avoiding them unless I hear there has been a significant change or I have experience with a particular chipset.  I've had 2 laptops with integrated intel graphics and both cause too much annoyance to configure the graphics for a stable system.  

I had a similar experience about 7 years ago with nvidia chipsets where the only option for a stable system was to use the nv driver.  That hasn't been a problem for a few years with nvidia providing better quality drivers for freebsd and linux.

The ati proprietary driver had the same problems as nvidia in the same time span.  I never used the proprietary driver for ati cards if I could avoid it.  I've read that the current driver is more stable but is not available for freebsd.  The radeon driver was much better for ati cards than the nv driver for nvidia.  Now the radeonhd and radeon driver is much better than nouveau so I still haven't used the proprietary driver.


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## pkubaj (Sep 17, 2010)

According to Wikipedia, most of GMA graphics cards are supported on FreeBSD. It doesn't seem outdated as it was updates when 8.1RC was released. So what is the support for GMA on FreeBSD like?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#FreeBSD


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## G4 (Sep 17, 2010)

ATI published specs, and everyone assumes that quality drivers will write themselves, because anyone can, if they need to, right?
Practice shows it's not that easy - proper support (good performance, 2d/3d acceleration, video decoding, etc.) for modern cards is pretty much nonexistent, open specs or not, and has been since forever.

You need to choose depending on what your needs are. If you need to actually take full advantage of a 100+ bucks card on FreeBSD, get an NVidia card.

I'd rather depend on a vendor that more or less has proved support for this platform by actually shipping and maintaining decent code (for most of the time), than to rely on some open specs and hope.
Specifications alone will not accelerate your 3d effects or decode your bluray movie


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## adamk (Sep 17, 2010)

G4 said:
			
		

> ATI published specs, and everyone assumes that quality drivers will write themselves, because anyone can, if they need to, right?
> Practice shows it's not that easy -



Which is why AMD also (directly and indirectly) pays developers to work on the open source drivers.



> proper support (good performance, 2d/3d acceleration, video decoding, etc.) for modern cards is pretty much nonexistent, open specs or not, and has been since forever.



While that's true about video decoding, excellent 2D acceleration has been available, in FreeBSD, on all radeons up to and including the HD4950 for quite a while now.  Decent 3D acceleration has been available for a fair while, too.  The open source drivers also support acceleration on the HD5xxx cards now, but no one has ported that to FreeBSD.



> Specifications alone will not accelerate your 3d effects or decode your bluray movie



My 3D effects work just fine, thank you very much.

Adam


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## vermaden (Sep 17, 2010)

pkubaj said:
			
		

> It's kind of OT, but I'm considering buying a notebook with GMA 4500HD. Can you write how it performs on FreeBSD? I have no experience with GMA GPU's other than GMA 500, the unfamous Poulsbo, but it support about nothing whatsoever x(



I have X4500/GM45 in my Dell Latitude E6400 laptop and FreeBSD plays really well with it, for laptops Intel graphics cards are good choice because of low power consumption.


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## oliverh (Sep 17, 2010)

adamk said:
			
		

> Which is why AMD also (directly and indirectly) pays developers to work on the open source drivers.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



The essential work is done by Novell not AMD. 

>but no one has ported that to FreeBSD.

Guess why, "no one" is essentially just one person: Robert Noland. He has to do all the work (Nouveau, DRM, Radeon, Intel, Xorg per se). You see, as I said, FreeBSD graphics is more ore less in a so-so state. FreeBSD is in desperate need for more developers experienced in this area. 

Intel drivers are way behind, Radeon is just a matter of time before it is incompatible because of some missing features in FreeBSD kernel.


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## adamk (Sep 17, 2010)

oliverh said:
			
		

> The essential work is done by Novell not AMD.



The initial radeonhd driver was developed by Novell, contracted by AMD (hence, AMD indirectly paid the developers).  I wouldn't consider the radeonhd driver essential, however.  Certainly not for a long time.

The work on the r300-r800 driver stack in Mesa, in the radeon DDX, and the kernel DRM is mostly done by RedHat folks, also paid by AMD, with contributions from outside developers and even some work from developers at AMD.



> Guess why, "no one" is essentially just one person: Robert Noland. He has to do all the work (Nouveau, DRM, Radeon, Intel, Xorg per se). You see, as I said, FreeBSD graphics is more ore less in a so-so state. FreeBSD is in desperate need for more developers experienced in this area.
> 
> Intel drivers are way behind, Radeon is just a matter of time before it is incompatible because of some missing features in FreeBSD kernel.



Absolutely, but it's not even the DRM where things are falling behind.  Even Mesa from git doesn't compile without some hacking on the build.

Has anyone even heard from Robert lately?

Adam


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## aragon (Sep 17, 2010)

adamk said:
			
		

> I've used the same command on both FreeBSD and linux:
> 
> [cmd=]xrandr --output DVI-0 --primary[/cmd]


I've had another crack with the radeon driver tonight.  The --primary option didn't help, but I did discover the "Primary" xorg.conf option in the Monitor section tonight.  This allowed me to reorder displays.

However, now I'm getting [thread=17840]this[/thread].


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## zspider (Sep 18, 2010)

vermaden said:
			
		

> I have X4500/GM45 in my Dell Latitude E6400 laptop and FreeBSD plays really well with it, for laptops Intel graphics cards are good choice because of low power consumption.




I have a GMA 900 in my desktop, It works pretty well most of the time other than the sluggish 3d performance and occasional xserver crash. Too bad that there seems to be storm clouds over its future hardware


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## aragon (Sep 18, 2010)

Has anyone managed to get texture compression working with a recent Radeon card?  Apparently there are patent issues with it, but some games need it unfortunately.


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## adamk (Sep 18, 2010)

aragon said:
			
		

> Has anyone managed to get texture compression working with a recent Radeon card?  Apparently there are patent issues with it, but some games need it unfortunately.



No, it just won't work with the HD cards.  The r300-r500 generation GPUs now support it properly, but only with the gallium3d driver, which is not available on FreeBSD.

Adam


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## vermaden (Sep 18, 2010)

http://libv.livejournal.com/22502.html
... a good read about all that x11 mess.



			
				&quot said:
			
		

> Apparently, and this has been the hot new idea for the last year or two; for Xserver 1.10 people want to get rid of one of the greatest things that XFree86 brought us, and one of the better changes that happened after the X.org fork: modular graphics drivers.


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## CalBear96 (Oct 19, 2010)

I realize this is a solved post, but I had one question that is relevant to the post.  (I think... Being a NOOB I am unsure) I am about to get a Clevo B5130M with HM55 express chipset and Intel GMA iGPU and nVidia GT425M dGPU.  Has there been any luck in getting Optimus to work in FreeBSD or will I just be stuck with the iGPU?  Also, if I use Windows 7 in a VM will it provide access to the dGPU as it has native Optimus support?  Thanks in advance for not roasting me if I should have put this elsewhere... just did not want to create a new thread when this one seemed relevant.
Thanks


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## adamk (Oct 19, 2010)

The nvidia drivers for linux/FreeBSD do not support Optimus.  Unless the computer's BIOS has an option to switch between the graphics (which very few Optimus laptops have since it defeats the purpose of Optimus) you will be stuck with the intel GPU.

Also, VMs virtualize their own graphics card, so Windows 7 in a VM would not see either the intel or nvidia GPU, but whatever GPU is being virtualized.

Adam


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## CalBear96 (Oct 19, 2010)

Thanks, that answers my questions.  Dual booting it is.


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