Nvidia Releases Updated Drivers for FreeBSD

brsmith4 writes "Nvidia has released their latest drivers for the FreeBSD platform. This release addresses a number of issues and has been anticipated for well over a year. You will need at least 4.9-STABLE or any of the 5.x-CURRENT releases to install them. Some of the new features include added support for the latest NVIDIA GPUs including GeForce 6800 Series and improved interaction with -CURRENT's new threading libraries, not to mention the fact that my Dell laptop no longer shuts off the LCD when the driver gets loaded. The driver also provides tighter integration with the linux execution environment, making it very easy to run your favorite linux game titles. You can pick up the driver here. Pay no attention to the date, August 13th, 2003. It was a type-o."

All else being equal,

[b00m3rang]

This kind of support for open source users is what keeps me coming back to certain hardware manufacturers. The more companies realize this, the better it is for everyone.

Re:All else being equal,

[Brandybuck]

It's too late for me. Tired of waiting for a driver that didn't hang my system, I finally sold my NVidia card and bought an ATI Radeon 9200. The Open Source radeon driver might not be as good as the proprietary nvidia driver, but it's more than enough to meet my needs.

I understand both sides of the free vs proprietary driver debate. But for me it comes down to a driver that I don't have to wait a year for to get a bug fix.

Re:All else being equal,

[SillyNickName4me]

I was about to do the same but decided to meddle with the old driver for a last time to see if it could in fact work. It did work for me upto and including FreeBSD 5.1, and I got it to work again on -current by basicly going back to a kernel and pthread setup similar to 5.1, which of course made using -current a bit pointless.. but hey, I got a working workstation with fast opengl, and that is what I needed..

This new fdriver is good news, means I can go back to tracking -current and actually seeing some re

Re:All else being equal,

[Brandybuck]

The driver broke on me going from 5.1 to 5.2.1. I tried all sorts of things to get it to work, including juggling schedulers and threading libraries, to no avail. Now I've got a card that still has fast openGL, and runs slightly cooler as well.

Re:All else being equal,

[SillyNickName4me]

And I kept some money in my pocket..

Re:All else being equal,

[ctr2sprt]

That's exactly right. NVIDIA's continuing high-quality support for FreeBSD and Linux has made me an avid supporter of their cards. Let's be honest: they aren't making any money off this. There just aren't enough Linux gamers (and even fewer FreeBSD ones) for it to be worthwhile for them, but they're doing it anyway. That counts for a hell of a lot in my book.

Forgive me for the glorified "me too" post.

Re:All else being equal,

[drinkypoo]

They're just hedging their bets. I doubt it's costing them all that much (in their grand scheme) to support linux and bsd, and if either or both of these operating systems ever take off like the proverbial skyrocket, their support of the community will be well-rewarded.

Re:All else being equal,

[ShavenGoat]

I don't know how true that is. The high end video cards for scientific computing cost well over $2k, which puts in a large margin for them to profit at least in one small area. In my experiance, not many visualization scientists use Windows for bleeding edge graphics.

In addition, porting a graphics card to more than one platform gives the vendor a chance to find bugs in their design that they might not discover with a single platform release.

Re:All else being equal,

[archen]

I wouldn't be so sure that they're not making money off of it. Personally, I bought an nvidia card because of the Linux/BSD support (whee, big deal right?) I also make the purchasing decisions where I work (we build our own machines). I always try to make sure that our machines aren't tied to any OS be it by software OR hardware. Yeah, we use windows now, but if we switch to Linux then I know the nvidia support will (hopefully still) be there. So nvidia is the default choice. That's 50 machines and counting.

In a similar way I was looking for a SATA RAID card for my machine since I couldn't get the on board Promise junk to work. Now what card would I choose? It seems like the best support came from 3ware , and they make pretty good cards too. Now they have a loyal customer and I'll ALWAYS recommend them over the competition.

They might not make the money back on a 1 on 1 customer basis, but I think that they're making quite a bit of it back in mind share of tech people. I'm not significant by myself, but my range of influence between work, my friends, and various people reaches pretty far. At some point marketing glitz can only go so far. Proof of support for your products can make a bigger difference than marketing in some cases.

Re:All else being equal,

[be-fan]

NVIDIA is making money off the Linux drivers. NVIDIA is pretty much the only game in town for Linux graphics workstations, something which quite a few companies are using these days (eg: ILM). Since they have to write Quadro drivers for this market anyway, it's easy for them to support consumer-level NVIDIA cards too.

Re:All else being equal,

[mi]

A binary-only driver is not "high-quality" support. I want my next machine to be an amd64-based FreeBSD box. XFree86 and X.org compile on the platform, but these NVidia drivers will not work...

I'm not one of the purists

[b00m3rang]

I don't mind running a few closed source binaries in otherwise open systems. As a result, I have a working video driver written by those who designed the hardware. I've personally had better luck with the nVidia cards, I'm just glad they made the effort.

Besides, more people deciding to run open source OSes because they work with a wide range of new video cards /is/ good for the community.

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[Hatta]

The open source drivers would be just as good if they had the specifications. Doesn't it bother you to buy a piece of hardware and they won't even tell you how it works, which effectively means the company gets to tell you what you can and can't do with it? Is that how a good company should treat its customers?

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[0racle]

I have no idea how my car works. I have no idea how they make plastic. i have no idea what processes food goes through before it hits my mouth either. Face it, there is a lot, probably most of the things you deal with every day, that you have no idea about how they work, were made and the like. You trust the people that made them that they know what they're doing and its the same with closed drivers. Hell i can't read C worth damn, so even open drivers are a mystery to me.

Freedom and power

[jbn-o]

This is not about what you can currently do. This is about putting yourself in a position where independence is possible. If you choose to remain dependant when given enough information to behave otherwise, that's a choice that chiefly affects you (a freedom). But not having the information in the first place adversely affects everyone, even those with the skill and will to help themselves and others (a power). Some of us do read ingredient labels on food and cook from recipes because we care about what we eat. Some of us care about industrial processes that affect our air and water (such as plastic production) and, therefore, fight for an increased say in how we get plastic goods.

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[Breakfast Pants]

" The open source drivers would be just as good if they had the specifications." This is untrue. Granted if the specs were available the open source drivers would be a HELL of a lot better and more importantly could be continued to be updated in the future (whereas with these proprietary drivers you can't put any bets on that) but to say they would be "just as good if they had the specifications" shows a blatant lack of awareness for what goes on in the drivers for modern 3d hardware. Having the cards no

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[be-fan]

The open source drivers would be just as good if they had the specifications.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. The DRI ATI drivers are less than half the speed of their Windows counterparts. The only specifications on those that aren't available is HyperZ, and that could hardly result in a 50% reduction in performance. Also, the DRI drivers aren't good enough to pass any sort of OpenGL conformance suite either. To date, there does not exist an open-source 3D driver that is good as NVIDIA's binary one.

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[phats garage]

Would NVidia's business be just as good if they openned up their drivers? Would they retain every bit of their competitive edge? Apparently the video card market is all about competition and a few months lead can be pretty advantageous.

How beneficial is it to NVidia to give away all the source to their drivers?

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[Ezdaloth]

You can't open up all the specs, they are (at least) partially covered by IP of other companies. NVIDIA pays those companies to use their IP, and therefore can't open up the specs.

Re:But freedom isn't equal to being dependant.

[SillyNickName4me]

> One can only hope those "certain hardware manufacturers" aren't the ones that treat you like nVidia does. This is not "support", this is an opportunity to acquire a set of chains. Fans of the open source methodology ought to see how accepting proprietary code isn't going to make your system better--you're choosing to toss out the developmental advantages that open source advocates focus on (or instead not recognizing the limitations in ignoring software freedom for users). The free software community w

Re:But freedom isn't equal to being dependant.

[jbn-o]

[...]don't try to express and pursue a political and social goal with their license.

I think this was the most revealing part of your post -- don't dare express yourself politically because we can't handle any of that kind of discussion in here. One wonders then in what sense the user is in any way free with FreeBSD if one is relegated to backing such stifling anti-discussion.

Re:But freedom isn't equal to being dependant.

[SillyNickName4me]

> I think this was the most revealing part of your post

I think you cannot read.

> -- don't dare express yourself politically because we can't handle any of that kind of discussion in here.

Heh, no, just don't assume that everyone who is involved with writing open source software shares the same ideas that are very popular among GPL proponents.

Specifically, when looking at BSD licensed software, as is the case with FreeBSD (just in case you didn't notice yet, we were discussing FreeBSD, not Linux here), you may actually notice that the people designign and writing it don't care that much about 'the open source methodology' but about making something that is usable to everyone. You make closed source software? fine. Makign a card with closed source drivers? perfect, we don't care.

You make somethign wuith a closed source FreeBSD driver? great, if you want it will get listed as a FreeBSD supporting device.

If you think that pointing out the difference between that way of thinking, and the way of thinkign that is very popular among GPL 'fans' is stiffening the discussion, then well, too bad.

I do think tho that you are a bit oversensitive to statements that might be read as being negative with regards to the GPL, and thereby are doign the exact thing that you accuse me of, stiffenign discussion.

Re:But freedom isn't equal to being dependant.

[jbn-o]

Heh, no, just don't assume that everyone who is involved with writing open source software shares the same ideas that are very popular among GPL proponents.

I did not do this. I would not do this because the GPL expresses a very different philosophy from the open source movement [gnu.org]. I stated something that is true for all free software, including FreeBSD. Whatever motivates FreeBSD developers to continue their work isn't the point; the work they produce is licensed such that everyone (including users)

Re:But freedom isn't equal to being dependant.

[SillyNickName4me]

> I'm not against non-copylefted free software licenses. I think that programs licensed under them are a gift to everyone. Being a gift to everyone, there is a real risk that the developer and the free software community can suffer when a proprietor with superior advertising power makes a proprietary derivative and that derivative becomes accepted. A developer can end up competing against a derivative of their own code and the community can watch a proprietary incompatible modification make their version

Type-o?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a bad type-o, then was it a type-o negative?

Re:Type-o?

[brsmith4]

At least your critique of my spelling was amusing.

what about 5-release or stable when that comes out

[pillohead]

Will this work on 5.2.1 release or will I have to wait til 5 stablizes?

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[brsmith4]

Worked for me. Getting better frame rates on BSD than on linux.

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[Anonymous Coward]

Well cough up the numbers then.

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[brsmith4]

These are all averages over five minute segments, same levels and scenes

Platforms: FreeBSD 5.2.1-CURRENT w/ ports/emulators/linux-base-8 (RedHat 8) vs. Fedora Core 2 w/ vanilla 2.6.7

Card: GeForce2Go 32Mb (Default CPU Clock and Mem Clock, obviously, since nvclock does not support mobile devices)

Quake 3:
Linux: 1024x768@32bit full detail settings 37.45fps
FreeBSD: 1024x768@32bit full detail settings 40.10fps

Endgame (chess screensaver):
Linux: 1024x768@32bit 42.78fps
FreeBSD: 1024x768@32bit 47.50fps

Return to Castle Wolfenstein:
Linux: 1024x768@32bit NVFog, 2xAniso, Full detail 33.40fps
FreeBSD: 1024x768@32bit NVFog, 2xAniso, Full detail 36.40fps

Atunnel Screensaver:
Linux: 1024x768@32bit 47.90fps
FreeBSD: 1024x768@32bit 43.74fps

Glxgears (obligatory):
Linux: 400x400@32bit window 724.20
FreeBSD: 400x400@32bit window 790.00

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[brsmith4]

Hey, YMMV. Don't call people liars if you can't prove the truth.

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[endx7]

From the README:

- FreeBSD -STABLE (4.9 or later), or FreeBSD -CURRENT (5.2.1 or later)

* A FreeBSD 4.x/-STABLE kernel configured with:
options SYSVSHM

* A FreeBSD 5.x/-CURRENT kernel configured with:
options SYSVSHM

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[sp0rk173]

I'm pretty sure the submitter meant to say 5.x-release instead of 5.x current, since there's only one perpetual release of -current, not many.

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[duffahtolla]

It's "current" according to the nvidia site.. Follow the driver link for details.

===
Release Highlights:

• Add support for the latest NVIDIA GPUs including GeForce 6800 Series
• Supports FreeBSD -STABLE (4.9 or later), or FreeBSD -CURRENT (5.2.1 or later)
• Improved interaction with -CURRENT's new threading libraries.

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[kace]

I'm pretty sure the proper interpretation of "4.x/-STABLE" would be "a 4.x release or -STABLE" and similarly for "5.x/-CURRENT" --> "a 5.x release or -CURRENT".

K.C.

Re: Update your troll

[Cochonou]

DragonFly BSD has released [dragonflybsd.org].

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Not illiteracy.

[nurb432]

Its just that no one cares, since it really isn't important.

Personally I fall into that category.

About damn time !

[SILIZIUMM]

An update every 6 months is welcome for sure ! I hope they will sync their release path with the Linux drivers, THAT would be awesome (ie when the Linux driver is avaiable, the FreeBSD one will be (or within days...)).

Re:About damn time !

[brsmith4]

These new drivers rock too. My frame rates are phenominal and my dell laptop finally works. Its been a long wait especially when you're being forced to run linux instead of the OS you really want to run.

Re:About damn time !

[evilviper]

I hope they will sync their release path with the Linux drivers, THAT would be awesome (ie when the Linux driver is avaiable, the FreeBSD one will be (or within days...)).

That would suck.

The second-best thing about the FreeBSD drivers, is that we manage to miss-out on some of the bugs often found in the Linux versions.

In case anyone is wondering, the #1 best thing about the FreeBSD drivers, is that they are something like 90% source, while the Linux drivers are more like 90% binary...

Thanks, nVIDIA

[agraupe]

I use linux, not BSD, but I imagine the two are close in some aspects. It took me literally a minute to install nVIDIA drivers on my gentoo box, whereas the "integrated graphics" I had prior to that took the better part of a day searching, patching various things, recompiling kernels, and installing. It is good to see that some hardware companies *do* care about open-source support. And I really don't care that the driver isn't open, as long as it's free (beer).

Its just a theory...

[andreyw]

But I think I know why the (new) FreeBSD drivers are better than the linux ones released some time ago.

Simple - nVidia is trying out something new, and in order to get some testing they choose FreeBSD. If the drivers backfire, there will be less noise from the user-land. They can then always claim -well, its just some problem we encountered on BSD. Think of this as a beta-test. The new linux drivers should be just around the corner :-).

But hey, nVidia has succeeded in making me give FreeBSD a test-drive.

It's simple.

[ftgow]

Although the "Unix on the Desktop" market segment, as it relates to 3d cards and 3d games is small (but much more cooler) but they are making money, (just bought a 500 dollar 6800 Ultra from BFG, because of the GPU's Support for the Linux operating system I'm so fond of. Regardless, even if I did not make them any money the way NVIDIA is going about business is really smart. First off you have to realize their not all together a 3d card company. They do other things as well, Chipsets, Audio, Networks, etc.