In search of a video card

[Rick C. Petty]

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 08:06:34PM -0700, Josef Grosch wrote:
> 
> So, can any one recommend a good video card? What I'm looking for is
> 
>   * Works with amd64 FreeBSD 7.2
>   * DVI 
>   * PCI-E x16
>   * 512 MB or more
>   * Not going to cost an arm and a leg

I just bought an nVidia and an ATI on newegg for under $30 each (plus
mail-in rebates), buth PCI x16, DVI+VGA, 512MB.  I have tried them both on
amd64 and this is what I've discovered:

- The ATI is quite fast for xvideo (via mplayer) and somewhat fast on 3D,
there seems to be some cursor-related artifacts (I've tried a number of
cards with the same results).
- The nVidia card required Robert Noland's patches applied against
RELENG_7, and the latest git checkouts of the nouveau driver and the libdrm
code.  I forcibly installed xf86-video-nouveau and then "gmake install"'d
the nouveau build on top of it.  I did the same for libdrm.  It was very
slow for xvideo (mplayer) and 3D acceleration was nonexistent.  I could not
get the "nv" driver to work in dual-head mode nor in single-head mode.
Nouveau didn't support my onboard card either.

Neither of these drivers comes remotely close to the performance of the
same cards using the nvidia driver (on i386).  I tried ati and nouveau on
i386 for comparisons.  The nvidia driver did support my onboard video.  I
ran these tests on a couple of ATI cards and various nvidia cards.  It was
very frustrating.  I'm using the ati/radeon driver currently on amd64 until
nvidia finishes their 64-bit driver.

YMMV,

-- Rick C. Petty