Suggested upgrade for a GeForce GT 450

[Valeri Galtsev]

> On Feb 7, 2021, at 1:48 PM, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 7 Feb 2021 16:57:47 +0100, Tomasz CEDRO wrote:
>> However, it turns out that nVidia in a nightmare for Open-Source, so
>> you cannot do anything except what they give you with a binary blob
>> driver, that is basic display stuff. If you want to do OpenCL or
>> similar then forget nVidia.
> 
> That is also my individual experience with nVidia. While there
> are open source drivers, they're not as good as the binary ones
> supplied by nVidia, so if you expect 3D stuff to work (and most
> desktop environemnts today cannot work without them), you will
> have to use the original nVidia drivers, because neither "nv"
> nor "nouveau" would provide more functionality and performance
> than "vesa" (as "lowest common denominator") would.

There is reason for that. Nvidia does not disclose much of chip internals (like memory layout etc), so to write decent open source driver is not possible, hence only generic functions are supported by open source nv driver. Anything a step off usual, say dual screen with different screen resolutions - quite often thing in the Department I support - is not possible. You have to install Nvidia proprietary binary driver (I often correct those who say “compile nvidia driver”. Nope! What one is compiling is interface between proprietary binary driver and specific kernel).

>> After 20 years of being loyal customer of nVidia I have switched to
>> AMD RADEON RX580 simply because they support Open-Source while nVidia
>> does not.
> 
> In the past, ATi had excellent open source support for all the
> features of the graphics card, and there was one (!) driver that
> supported them (named "ati"). Worked out of the box, no further
> fiddling with xorg.conf options or XML files... :-)

Same observation here. ATI chip internals were decently described by manufacturer in their documentation, so open source driver developers can write excellent drivers supporting pretty much all capabilities of the chip[set]. Such were my observations for a couple of decades, even after AMD bought ATI. Someone, correct me if you noticed things changed, which I hope they didn’t.

Valeri

> -- 
> Polytropon
> Magdeburg, Germany
> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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