Accelerated nVidia Drivers for FreeBSD

zero0w writes "nVidia has released the official OpenGL accelerated driver set for FreeBSD 4.7 STABLE. Check out the nVidia Driver page for more detail. According to the page, this release should be considered as initial beta. So don't count on it to build a day-to-day production system, yet."

Comments

Does BSD for games make sense?

[Max Romantschuk]

I'm the kind of person who likes to run Windows for games and multimedia, and Linux for server stuff.

It has been under my impression that BSD development is even more focused on server side and ultra stable solutions.

Of course drivers make sense to use X on BSD, but what about games? Does it pay off to keep BSD for games, or is it simpler to use Linux/Windows for gaming? Just wondering, I guess :)

Will it work with FreeBSD 5.0 and later?

[Leimy]

I haven't been running FreeBSD now for almost a month because my job is linux related and the more familiar I am with it the better I do.

I wasn't planning to use FreeBSD again until 5.0 got released which I *think* is slated for the end of the month still [whether it makes it or not is a different situation].

Anyway I hope this driver continues to work on later FreeBSDs as it was a major bummer to not have it the last 2 years I ran this OS.

what about other BSDs?

[Hythlodaeus]

I don't know anything about any differences in how the BSDs handle drivers, so I'll ask, how much work would it take to make these nVidia drivers run under NetBSD or OpenBSD?

Re:FreeBSD != Linux

[evilviper]

S3 texture compression is patented and closed source, so no open source drivers can enable it even if they know how

Correction... No GPL'd driver can enable it even if they know how. There's no reason a BSD driver couldn't be released, and simply leave it up to the user to handle the patent/license issues if required in their locale.

But that doesn't really matter much to me. I am quite willing to reject any programs that use patented technologies, or otherwise does not operate on a decent OS.