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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."

5 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 shane_rimmer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I hate to say it, but that is precisely why I use Nvidia based cards in my computers. Their hardware may not be the best, and they won't open the specs for the cards, but at least I can get full functionality out of my video card under FreeBSD and Linux.

      If ATI ever supports non-MS operating systems the same way or better than Nvidia, I may consider purchasing one of their cards.

  2. Re:FUCK NVIDIA by Decibel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How does 'never had anythingto do with the GPL' make them suck? They're releasing drivers for a GPL and BSD-licensed OS, that's not good enough for you?

    Sorry, I guess you're one of those people who will never be happy until no one anywhere can make any money off of any software or anything related to software. Nevermind.

  3. Re:Why is this happening? by CoolVibe · · Score: 4, Informative
    Troll, but I'll bite.

    When you use X on your local host, it doesn't really use the network stack. Read up on pipes and domain sockets before you spout off like that. You can still use X without having network support in your kernel. You only need sockets Ergo, nothing moves across any network. So all your points are basically uninformed drivel.

    Domain sockets (like the ones X uses locally) are a very efficient way to do IPC. Every write() on a domain socket in in practice a memcpy/memmove operation. So the overhead is really really small. And you get network transparancy basically for free. It has _no_ impact whatsoever on what you do locally.

    If you want to point the blame at the "slowness" of X, blame the toolkits. GTK is slow. Motif is slow. Qt is slow. Xlib is VERY fast, but cumbersome to use.

  4. 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.

    --
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