free bsd on laptops

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 4 Aug 2010, Thomas Donnelly wrote:
> Kevin Oberman wrote:
>>> 
>> ATI is open source friendly. NVIDIA is not. Still, both generally work.
>> 
> I must be missing something because to my knowledge FreeBSD does not have any 
> 3D support for any modern ATi card

radeon(4x) has 3D acceleration, and 3D software seems to use it (I'm 
not a serious 3D user, so there may be subtleties here).

As far as modern cards, it supports X- (X700), 1000- (1650, 1950), 
2000-, 3000-, and 4000-series cards.  5000-series are not yet supported.

> while nVidia has 32 and 64 bit drivers that work very well for full 3D 
> acceleration (needed for things like compiz).

Forum users have reported success with compiz on Radeon cards.  I have 
not yet tried that (started but got distracted by other things).

> I am running 8-Stable amd64 with a GTX 260 in my desktop at work and 
> it runs very fast. I would extremely highly recommend nVidia over ATi 
> if you are going to be using FreeBSD. My Inspiron XPS has an ATi 
> Mobility Radeon 9800 and not only does it not have 3D support, it also 
> frequently hard locks when running the ATi driver. This laptop works 
> fine with any other OS.

Mobility 9800 isn't explicitly listed as working with the radeon driver, 
and of course it's very old.  A Dell integrated FireGL 9000 with 32M of 
video RAM didn't seem to like 3D, either, but I don't know if that can 
be blamed on just the radeon driver.

> Also, Intel Integrated works well and is a decent choice if you don't need 
> lots of horsepower.

Well... there are problems with the way Intel is going with the driver. 
The latest versions of the Intel integrated video hardware can be a 
problem.