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Graphics Operating Systems Software BSD Hardware

New FreeBSD NVIDIA Drivers Available 81

Posted by timothy from the oh-4365-at-last dept.
CoolVibe writes "Finally, the officieal Nvidia drivers for FreeBSD have been updated to version 4365. The drivers are available at Nvidia's website. They are not in the ports yet, but that won't take very long. Also, this driver supports both STABLE and CURRENT officially. I am using them at the moment, and boy, these fix many problems I had with the older ones."
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New FreeBSD NVIDIA Drivers Available More

New FreeBSD NVIDIA Drivers Available

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  • FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by eviltypeguy ( 521224 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2003 @02:47PM (#6352413)
    Wish I could be more excited but I dumped my NVidia card a month or so ago.

    I am glad to see this though, the old NVidia FreeBSD drivers were pretty horrid.

    To ATi I would say:
    "Where are my finished Linux drivers, and FreeBSD drivers ATi? ARE YOU LISTENING?"

    Seriously. Their Win32 drivers are pretty decent, but their Linux drivers need some serious performance and OpenGL work done.

    In their infinite wisdom, they do not provide FreeBSD drivers, nor the information to commercial companies that want to write drivers for their 9600/9700/9800 series of cards.

    It's sad really. This almost makes me wish I had kept my NVidia card...

    • Re:FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by shane_rimmer ( 622400 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2003 @06:49PM (#6354537)

      I hate to say it, but that is precisely why I use Nvidia based cards in my computers. Their hardware may not be the best, and they won't open the specs for the cards, but at least I can get full functionality out of my video card under FreeBSD and Linux.

      If ATI ever supports non-MS operating systems the same way or better than Nvidia, I may consider purchasing one of their cards.

    • Re:FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Lx ( 12170 )
      Hm? The DRI for ATI cards under FreeBSD works fine, just not always for the most recent cards. I personally prefer it to using closed-source kernel modules.

      • Re:FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by eviltypeguy ( 521224 ) on Thursday July 03, 2003 @11:29AM (#6359387)
        Sadly, it doesn't "work fine". ATi is refusing to provide any 3D hardware specific information for the 9600 / 9700 / 9800 series of cards to commercial driver developres or to the XFree project. What little is known about them has been reversed engineer from their binary drivers. Only 2D support information will eventually be provided.

        ATi is of the opinion that there are too many trade secrets for them to divulge the 3d hardware programming information, they also believe that open source programmers are not competent enough to write drivers for "such advanced programmable hardware".
      • The DRI for ATI cards under FreeBSD works fine, just not always for the most recent cards.

        Really? I get an error from the kernel module saying Radeon (QE) 8500 not supported. No idea why, but it means that I don't get any kind of acceleration from my Radeon 8500. Shame really. It doesn't worry me much, I got the card since it can run 1600x1200@85Hz on a dual monitor set up (My old nVidia GeForce 2MX couldn't, since it only had a single RAMDAC) and don't do much by way of 3D stuff on this machine, but

      • Hardly.

        The specs typically roll in around 12 months after the release of a new card, and then they are incomplete and contain numerous errors and contradications. Check the DRI Devel mailing list for details. Also check the Gatos mailing list. They've been contacting ATI regularly for the past year for docs for the new Rage Theatre chips, and haven't even received a response of any kind.

        ATI started out providing some docs, but have since changed their mind to saying they provide docs while providing nothi
    • I dumped my NVidia card

      So you running headless then ? ;))

    • Re:FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Wow... so you dumped your NVidia card in favour of an even more unsupported card?

      I'm in awe of your cutting-edgeness.

      Or your consumer-lemming-ness. Take your pick.

  • hoorah (Score:4, Interesting)

    by thanjee ( 263266 ) on Wednesday July 02, 2003 @06:08PM (#6354234) Journal
    This is good news.

    About every second time I reboot my computer the xdm login screen is all messed up. I have to hit ctlr-alt-backspace to reinit x, so that the drivers kick in properly. If I don't it locks up the computer during the login sequence. It is the same for both my 4.8 and 5.0 machine.

    I am currently downloading the new drivers :)

    • Re:hoorah (Score:4, Informative)

      by thanjee ( 263266 ) on Thursday July 03, 2003 @09:31AM (#6358287) Journal
      These drivers are a major improvement, no more do I have to hit ctrl-alt-backspace when they misload (or whatever it is they did before). No fiddling, just went through the basic install procedure and well - I am much happier :)

      My playlist and add file screens on XINE are still messed up though (very hard to read) I don't even know if it gfx card related - any thoughts?

  • Much better... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wow. This driver is MUCH better than the old one. Five minutes without a crash! :)

    The lack of stable Nvidia drivers have been the major roadblock preventing me from switching to FreeBSD full-time.

    The only thing that would make this better is if it was an open source driver, but this is good enough for now...

  • Thank $DEITY! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by kevryn ( 126787 )
    I had so many problems with the old drivers on my -STABLE box. Couldn't run more than one GL app per X session or my whole system would lock up and had to be rebooted. Lots of instability, crashes, and broken apps. Hope this fixes things.
  • Hopefully fixes the issues where if I start Galeon X crashes out. Least there is now official support for 5.x so that I won't have to patch the kernel again

    Rus

  • I wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jo42 ( 227475 ) on Thursday July 03, 2003 @10:36AM (#6358885) Homepage
    Anyone know what Apple uses for video drivers in Mac OS X when you plop in a NVIDIA-based video card?

  • much better (Score:3, Informative)

    by lambsonic ( 512680 ) on Thursday July 03, 2003 @03:08PM (#6362099)

    This is much better. The first one recommended that I recompile the kernel, and X with no optimizations, but I tried it anyway and it didn't work as expected, but this one seems to work okay (a few bugs, but no show stoppers) even with these optimizations in make.conf on -stable:

    XFREE86_VERSION=4
    CPUTYPE=i686
    CFLAGS= -O2 -pipe -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fexpensive-optimizations
    CXXFLAGS+= -O2 -mcpu=i686 -march=i686 -fmemoize-lookups -fsave-memoized -fexpensive-optimizations -funroll-loops

    The install was pretty painless, too.

    • Re:much better (Score:4, Interesting)

      by CoolVibe ( 11466 ) on Thursday July 03, 2003 @04:26PM (#6362947) Journal
      Yup. These solve many problems I've had with the driver overwriting the %gs register in multithreaded OpenGL apps. It made apps SIGSEGV on exit. KDE (well, actually Qt) was very much affected, and one of the "fixes" was compiling Qt WITHOUT OpenGL support.

      The SIGSEGV "crashes" are totally gone, and these drives drive my GeForce 4 MX much (yeah, I know, cheap card) faster too. Tuxracer really runs very smooth! :)

      Anyway, these run mighty nice on my 5.1-RELEASE system. People that claim that BSD is dead plain don't know what they are blabbing about.

  • All I can say in regards to the nvidia drivers is that they are excellent. I followed their directions to the T and in less than thirty minutes had great results. Seeing Quake 3 run on FreeBSD is truly a beautiful thing.

    Note: That is with their very first release of the FreeBSD driver. I am sure it is even better now.
  • Just a personal experience. I grabbed this about 2 days ago and my -STABLE system crashed several times when I used the FreeBSD agp kernel module. I've changed over to use the builtin AGP support and everything has been rock-solid.

  • nvidia-driver port is already updated! (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Thankfully, port is alredy out: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/x11/nv idia-driver [freebsd.org]

    cvsup, portupgrade and it is working like charm.

  • BSD IS NOT DYING! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 06, 2003 @07:52AM (#6376551)
    How can BSD [freebsd.org] be dying when it has a mascot [freebsd.org] [freebsd.org] like this?! Linux needs to get its act together if it's going to compete with the kind of hot chicks [hope-2000.org] and gorgeous babes [hope-2000.org] that BSD has to offer!

    You just can't take Linux [redhat.com] seriously when its fronted by losers [nylug.org] like these. You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her [hope-2000.org]! I mean just look at this girl [madchat.org] ! Doesn't she [madchat.org] [madchat.org] make you hard? I know this little hottie [madchat.org] floats my boat! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox [spilth.org] . As you can see, no man can resist this sexy [spilth.org] little cock teaser [spilth.org] . Even this old bearded Unix guru is apparently unable to take his eyes off her [kurtspace.com] !

    With sexy chicks [spilth.org] [spilth.org] like the lovely Ceren you will have people queuing up to buy open source products. Look! This guy can't get in there fast enough with her [kurtspace.com] [kurtspace.com] in the doorway! Come on, you must admit she [kurtspace.com] [kurtspace.com] is better than an overweight penguin! Don't you wish you could get one of these [drexel.edu] [drexel.edu]? Join the campaign for more cute [madchat.org] [madchat.org] open source babes [madchat.org] [madchat.org] today!
    • to those in power

      mod this shit up!
    • You hit the nail on the head dude.

      Why do us BSD people like BSD so much? Because it gets us laid. Never mind those whiney Linux geekoids. BSD lets you grow a beard and long hair, and you'll still be attractive to the opposite sex.

      One caveat though, you do need to shower or bathe every once in a while. Although girls can't resist the looks of a bearded and long-haired daemon totin' ruffian, if you don't take care of your personal hygiene, the girls will approach, and then flee again.

      So there you have i

  • Funny. The old NVIDIA driver was ok for me- stable with 4.7, MSI GeForce Ti4200 128MB. No probs, no artifacts.

    But with 4.8-RELEASE when I recently tried adding IPFILTER it locks up on the KDM login screen. And also when I do startx. I confirmed that it's with IPFILTER (with the default accept). I doubt it's a firewall rule issue, coz when I flush the IPFW rules (default DENY) in a kernel without IPFILTER, things still work fine.

    Not sure why having ipfilter would do that.

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