WOW! {Or Holy whatever}

[Garrett Cooper]

Robert Huff wrote:
> Garrett Cooper writes:
> 
>>  	Anyhow, getting back to the video thing at hand, if Gary was to 
>>  purchase a card he should purchase an nVidia card. It's the only
>>  brand with OpenGL support properly enabled in Linux and
>>  FreeBSD. 5000-6000 series would be sufficient.
> 
> 	Anyone considering this option should search the archives for
> "nvidia +driver".  While there are many satisfied customers, others
> have had problems selecting the right driver and getting it to work
> with their individual combination of hardware+OS version.
> 
> 
> 			Robert "fore-armed is half an octopus" Huff

With that in mind, I can vouch that the ASUS 6200 card with 128MB of RAM 
  worked excellently, and I had no issues using the nvidia driver over 
the 2-3 years I had it in play. If you buy a more bleeding edge card, 
you'll probably run into support issues because there's only so much 
nVidia by themselves can test under FreeBSD.

Depends on what you're going to do, and you probably wouldn't see much 
rendering difference between a higher quality card with more RAM, but if 
you use some multimedia programs, like TV tuner apps or MPlayer, it will 
help. Also, as DE/WMs increase the dependency upon OpenGL, i.e. Beryl, 
XFCE4.4, you will need a slightly faster card if you want to render 
quickly / properly, and ATI doesn't currently offer any type of OpenGL 
solution on FreeBSD.

A good rule of thumb: Don't buy a video card with more RAM than 1/8 to 
1/4 of the system RAM, because the RAM is shared with the system RAM, 
which means you have less overall system RAM to use for apps.

-Garrett