# Howto Nvidia Drivers from Nvidia Inc



## minimike (Sep 21, 2010)

Hi

For installing the newest Nvidiadrivers without Ports, downloaded form http://nvidia.com is there a Howto available?
The Drivers from Ports seems doesn't support NVIDIA SLI setups. 

best regards
Darko Hojnik


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## DutchDaemon (Sep 21, 2010)

AFAIK, the driver in ports is the same driver as on the site; the port downloads that driver from the NVIDIA site and installs it 'in the FreeBSD way' and make sure it plays nicely with X.Org's 'competing' drivers. It's a binary blob, nothing to change.


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## minimike (Sep 21, 2010)

So I have to edit the Makefile? The driver from the Nvidia Site is newer then the Driver from the Ports


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## UNIXgod (Sep 21, 2010)

minimike said:
			
		

> So I have to edit the Makefile? The driver from the Nvidia Site is never then the Driver from the Ports



nvidia has documentation on their site. Is there a reson you feel the need to not use the driver in the ports?


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## vertexSymphony (Sep 21, 2010)

@DutchDaemon : Actually the driver in ports is very old (195.36.15 vs 256.53) ...  Those are the latest : 

x86: http://www.nvidia.com/object/freebsd-x86-256.53-driver.html 
x86_64: http://www.nvidia.com/object/freebsd-x64-256.53-driver.html

@minimike: If you install the driver from nvidia, you won't have an uninstaller (nor even something like make uninstall/deinstall/whatever), apart from that, the driver works awesome


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## SirDice (Sep 21, 2010)

Just edit the port's Makefile. Find the line with:

```
DISTVERSION?=   195.36.15
```

Change it to the latest version you can find on Nvidia's website. Then run `# make makesum` after that you can install it with `# make install clean`


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## OH (Sep 21, 2010)

Disregarding ports, one could (while not in X):
`$ tar -xzf NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86_64-260.19.04.tar.gz`
`$ cd NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86_64-260.19.04`
`$ make`
`$ su`
`# kldunload nvidia`
`# pkg_delete $(pkg_info -E nvidia-driver\*)`
`# make install`
`# exit`
`$ make clean`

If you don't want to leave X, skip the kldunload and restart your PC / X afterwards


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## DutchDaemon (Sep 21, 2010)

It's really advisable to do this _within_ the ports system to keep versioning intact.


```
nvidia-driver-256.53                >   succeeds index (index has 195.36.15)
```

This will at least signal the installed version vs the ports version.


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## DutchDaemon (Sep 22, 2010)

Apparently NVIDIA no longer consider the 64-bit drivers 'BETA'. The red line is gone from the splash screen.


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## minimike (Sep 22, 2010)

Ok guy's
I have installed the driver with "make setup"
They is working propper and two way SLI is working now. On Windows I am using two Cards with SLI and the third card onboard of the Mainboard is calculating PhysX only. Maybe we will get them in the future. Anybody here who knows about CUDA will work on FreeBSD?

best regards
Darko


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