# What video card has the best OpenGL support?



## Eponasoft (Oct 8, 2009)

So I'm probably going to be building a new machine in the next couple of months. My current machine, an Acer Aspire 3680, has abysmal OpenGL support...it works but it's sloooooow as hell. Doesn't bother me really, since I don't really use it now, but I have a project coming up where I will need a powerful OpenGL card and I need to know which modern card has the best success with FreeBSD. Now, I'm sure there are some people here who will tell me all about how the semantics of what I just said are all wrong...I don't care about the semantics because you all know what I mean even if I can't put it into the proper words.  I just want to know what card has the best OpenGL support and performance in FreeBSD. Thanks in advance. 

For the record, I will be using FreeBSD 8.0 for this project.


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## aragon (Oct 8, 2009)

Right now probably nVidia cards, but you'll have to stick to i386 and use a binary driver for it.

If you can wait, open source ATI 3D support on recent hardware should be usable soonishly.


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## Eponasoft (Oct 8, 2009)

It'll be running the 32 bit version, since all the apps it will be running are built for that. But it'll be a few months off so I've got time to wait. Thanks for the info.


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## jurrie (Oct 9, 2009)

If you manually update your mesa to 7.6 and apply a patch to the ati driver in ports, you can use f.e. the KDE4 desktop effects with a recent ati chip. There are still some issues with some corruption on the screen, but I haven't had any crashes yet. The progress is looking good!


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## Eponasoft (Oct 10, 2009)

Hrm ok that sounds reasonable. Fortunately, I won't be using KDE or any other desktop for this new project...it will merely start up X and then run a sole application. But that's good stuff to know, thanks.


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## aragon (Oct 10, 2009)

jurrie said:
			
		

> If you manually update your mesa to 7.6 and apply a patch to the ati driver in ports, you can use f.e. the KDE4 desktop effects with a recent ati chip. There are still some issues with some corruption on the screen, but I haven't had any crashes yet. The progress is looking good!



I take it you've done this?  Have you tried any games on it?


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## Oko (Oct 10, 2009)

aragon said:
			
		

> Right now probably nVidia cards, but you'll have to stick to i386 and use a binary driver for it.
> 
> If you can wait, open source ATI 3D support on recent hardware should be usable soonishly.


nVidia has only binary blob drivers for FreeBSD i386. The question was who has the best support for OpenGL. nVidia is closed hardware and has no support for anything.


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## adamk (Oct 10, 2009)

aragon said:
			
		

> I take it you've done this?  Have you tried any games on it?



I have done it on my HD3250.  It also requires -CURRENT, though the RCs can probably easily be patched.  neverball/neverputt is playable, as is openarena and nexuiz.

Adam


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## aragon (Oct 11, 2009)

Very cool!  I can't wait.


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