GPUs on FBSD?

[RW]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:06:13 -0500
Robert Huff <roberthuff at rcn.com> wrote:

> 
> usleepless at gmail.com writes:
> 
> >  > >  as far as i know there have been Nvidia maintained/improved
> >  > >  drivers for FreeBSD for ages ( ls /usr/ports/x11 | grep -i
> >  > > nvid )
> >  >
> >  >         And see this from the Makefile:
> >  >
> >  > # Starting with version 1.0-7667, NVidia has dropped support for
> >  > # numerous "legacy" GPUs.  Consult NVidia README (the Appendix)
> >  > to # find out whether you need to use legacy driver version and
> >  > install # one of corresponding `x11/nvidia-driver-71',
> >  > # `x11/nvidia-driver-96', or `x11/nvidia-driver-173' slave ports.
> >  >
> >  >
> >  are you trying to be right afterall?
> 
> 	Someone's confused.  If it's me, that needs to get fixed.

You're confused on more than one level because this thread is not about
graphics drivers, however:

nv is the basic open-source x11 driver provided with xorg, it has poor
2-d performance and no 3-d support, nouveau is a open-source fork from
nv that aims to improve performance and add 3-d support. nvidia is the
the proprietary binary provided by nvidia, it's been around for years,
but nvidia were not prepared to release an amd64 version until FreeBSD
provided certain features in the kernel. Those features will be in 8.0,
so nvidia are now working on an amd64 version.