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New FreeBSD NVIDIA Drivers Available

Posted by timothy on from the oh-4365-at-last dept.

CoolVibe writes "Finally, the officieal Nvidia drivers for FreeBSD have been updated to version 4365. The drivers are available at Nvidia's website. They are not in the ports yet, but that won't take very long. Also, this driver supports both STABLE and CURRENT officially. I am using them at the moment, and boy, these fix many problems I had with the older ones."

10 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. by eviltypeguy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Wish I could be more excited but I dumped my NVidia card a month or so ago.

    I am glad to see this though, the old NVidia FreeBSD drivers were pretty horrid.

    To ATi I would say:
    "Where are my finished Linux drivers, and FreeBSD drivers ATi? ARE YOU LISTENING?"

    Seriously. Their Win32 drivers are pretty decent, but their Linux drivers need some serious performance and OpenGL work done.

    In their infinite wisdom, they do not provide FreeBSD drivers, nor the information to commercial companies that want to write drivers for their 9600/9700/9800 series of cards.

    It's sad really. This almost makes me wish I had kept my NVidia card...

    1. Re:FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. by Lx · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Hm? The DRI for ATI cards under FreeBSD works fine, just not always for the most recent cards. I personally prefer it to using closed-source kernel modules.

    2. Re:FreeBSD Drivers...sigh. by eviltypeguy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Sadly, it doesn't "work fine". ATi is refusing to provide any 3D hardware specific information for the 9600 / 9700 / 9800 series of cards to commercial driver developres or to the XFree project. What little is known about them has been reversed engineer from their binary drivers. Only 2D support information will eventually be provided.

      ATi is of the opinion that there are too many trade secrets for them to divulge the 3d hardware programming information, they also believe that open source programmers are not competent enough to write drivers for "such advanced programmable hardware".

  2. hoorah by thanjee · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is good news.

    About every second time I reboot my computer the xdm login screen is all messed up. I have to hit ctlr-alt-backspace to reinit x, so that the drivers kick in properly. If I don't it locks up the computer during the login sequence. It is the same for both my 4.8 and 5.0 machine.

    I am currently downloading the new drivers :)

    --
    Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
  3. Much better... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Wow. This driver is MUCH better than the old one. Five minutes without a crash! :)

    The lack of stable Nvidia drivers have been the major roadblock preventing me from switching to FreeBSD full-time.

    The only thing that would make this better is if it was an open source driver, but this is good enough for now...

  4. Thank $DEITY! by kevryn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I had so many problems with the old drivers on my -STABLE box. Couldn't run more than one GL app per X session or my whole system would lock up and had to be rebooted. Lots of instability, crashes, and broken apps. Hope this fixes things.

  5. I wonder... by jo42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Anyone know what Apple uses for video drivers in Mac OS X when you plop in a NVIDIA-based video card?

    1. Re:I wonder... by gomerbud · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Check out the third party drivers section at the bottom of this page.

      http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/6. 0/release.html

      It seems that Apple has a similar situation with its NVidia and ATI drivers. They are only provided as binaries due to licencing restrictions.

      --
      Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
  6. Re:much better by CoolVibe · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Yup. These solve many problems I've had with the driver overwriting the %gs register in multithreaded OpenGL apps. It made apps SIGSEGV on exit. KDE (well, actually Qt) was very much affected, and one of the "fixes" was compiling Qt WITHOUT OpenGL support.

    The SIGSEGV "crashes" are totally gone, and these drives drive my GeForce 4 MX much (yeah, I know, cheap card) faster too. Tuxracer really runs very smooth! :)

    Anyway, these run mighty nice on my 5.1-RELEASE system. People that claim that BSD is dead plain don't know what they are blabbing about.

  7. The drivers are excellent. by readpunk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    All I can say in regards to the nvidia drivers is that they are excellent. I followed their directions to the T and in less than thirty minutes had great results. Seeing Quake 3 run on FreeBSD is truly a beautiful thing.

    Note: That is with their very first release of the FreeBSD driver. I am sure it is even better now.

    --

    ./revolution