5 Replies to “NVIDIA binary driver, again”

  1. I know I’m only daydreaming here, but it’d be nice if the ‘nv’ driver was ever enhanced to the point where it could do most of the things that the ‘nvidia’ driver could do.

    I know that nVidia doesn’t have a lot of publically available documentation on their hardware, but at the same time, would it really be that hard for someone to watch what the ‘nvidia’ driver is doing and duplicate the functionality?

    Just some good old fashioned send it some input, watch and record the output sort of reverse engineering.

  2. Easier said than done, from what I’ve heard. In any case, I’d sure like a less troublesome driver. NVIDIA cards are decent and relatively cheap.

    On the other hand, so are ATI cards, and I’ve had a lot better time getting those to work. Doesn’t help an existing investment, but if you’re going to upgrade…

  3. A silly question, but I’ve been wondering about how well supported ATI cards are under FreeBSD/DragonFly. I see a driver in there, but I’ve not heard many people’s experiences with them.

    Would you recomend ATI cards to people who want to use DragonFly (or FreeBSD for that matter) exclusively?

  4. It’s not really how well supported the cards are under DragonFly, but how well they are supported under XFree86. ATI’s cards have had more information released, as far as I know, so you don’t have to use a vendor-supplied binary driver to get 3D, for instance.

    The many cheap variations on the ATI Rage chipset used to drive me bonkers, but I’ve been happy with the several cards from the Radeon line that I’ve tried. You can probably get 3D working well, though video capture with the All-In-Wonder cards ranges from difficult to impossible. I did get a Radeon 8500 All-In-Wonder working, but it wasn’t possible to get 3D and video input working at the same time. (Stick to Brooktree-based cards for video in – they are cheap.)

  5. Oh, and these ATI experiences were with FreeBSD 4, so it should translate.

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