Nvidia Releases Updated Drivers for FreeBSD

brsmith4 writes "Nvidia has released their latest drivers for the FreeBSD platform. This release addresses a number of issues and has been anticipated for well over a year. You will need at least 4.9-STABLE or any of the 5.x-CURRENT releases to install them. Some of the new features include added support for the latest NVIDIA GPUs including GeForce 6800 Series and improved interaction with -CURRENT's new threading libraries, not to mention the fact that my Dell laptop no longer shuts off the LCD when the driver gets loaded. The driver also provides tighter integration with the linux execution environment, making it very easy to run your favorite linux game titles. You can pick up the driver here. Pay no attention to the date, August 13th, 2003. It was a type-o."

Comments

All else being equal,

[b00m3rang]

This kind of support for open source users is what keeps me coming back to certain hardware manufacturers. The more companies realize this, the better it is for everyone.

Re:All else being equal,

[Brandybuck]

It's too late for me. Tired of waiting for a driver that didn't hang my system, I finally sold my NVidia card and bought an ATI Radeon 9200. The Open Source radeon driver might not be as good as the proprietary nvidia driver, but it's more than enough to meet my needs.

I understand both sides of the free vs proprietary driver debate. But for me it comes down to a driver that I don't have to wait a year for to get a bug fix.

Re:All else being equal,

[ctr2sprt]

That's exactly right. NVIDIA's continuing high-quality support for FreeBSD and Linux has made me an avid supporter of their cards. Let's be honest: they aren't making any money off this. There just aren't enough Linux gamers (and even fewer FreeBSD ones) for it to be worthwhile for them, but they're doing it anyway. That counts for a hell of a lot in my book.

Forgive me for the glorified "me too" post.

Re:All else being equal,

[drinkypoo]

They're just hedging their bets. I doubt it's costing them all that much (in their grand scheme) to support linux and bsd, and if either or both of these operating systems ever take off like the proverbial skyrocket, their support of the community will be well-rewarded.

Re:All else being equal,

[archen]

I wouldn't be so sure that they're not making money off of it. Personally, I bought an nvidia card because of the Linux/BSD support (whee, big deal right?) I also make the purchasing decisions where I work (we build our own machines). I always try to make sure that our machines aren't tied to any OS be it by software OR hardware. Yeah, we use windows now, but if we switch to Linux then I know the nvidia support will (hopefully still) be there. So nvidia is the default choice. That's 50 machines and counting.

In a similar way I was looking for a SATA RAID card for my machine since I couldn't get the on board Promise junk to work. Now what card would I choose? It seems like the best support came from 3ware , and they make pretty good cards too. Now they have a loyal customer and I'll ALWAYS recommend them over the competition.

They might not make the money back on a 1 on 1 customer basis, but I think that they're making quite a bit of it back in mind share of tech people. I'm not significant by myself, but my range of influence between work, my friends, and various people reaches pretty far. At some point marketing glitz can only go so far. Proof of support for your products can make a bigger difference than marketing in some cases.

Re:All else being equal,

[be-fan]

NVIDIA is making money off the Linux drivers. NVIDIA is pretty much the only game in town for Linux graphics workstations, something which quite a few companies are using these days (eg: ILM). Since they have to write Quadro drivers for this market anyway, it's easy for them to support consumer-level NVIDIA cards too.

Re:All else being equal,

[ShavenGoat]

I don't know how true that is. The high end video cards for scientific computing cost well over $2k, which puts in a large margin for them to profit at least in one small area. In my experiance, not many visualization scientists use Windows for bleeding edge graphics.

In addition, porting a graphics card to more than one platform gives the vendor a chance to find bugs in their design that they might not discover with a single platform release.

Re:All else being equal,

[mi]

A binary-only driver is not "high-quality" support. I want my next machine to be an amd64-based FreeBSD box. XFree86 and X.org compile on the platform, but these NVidia drivers will not work...

Type-o?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a bad type-o, then was it a type-o negative?

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[brsmith4]

Worked for me. Getting better frame rates on BSD than on linux.

Troll alert.

[fmaxwell]

Huh? What is wrong with it?

This same troll has been posted every time a *BSD story has been run on Slashdot in recent memory. It's always posted anonymously, never identifies the mysterious "500 person company" that has decided to "convert fully to Open Source software and OSes." There is no indication of what their line of business is, what their servers are used for, what the desktop machines are used for, who the users are, etc. The "conclusion" speaks volumes about the intent: "Having considered the above factors, all of which are vitally important when implementing a new system in a company, we decided to go with Linux (primarily Debian for the reasons mentioned)." Yeah. Right. Another Debian Linux fanboy.

Think about it:

1. There are damned few companies converting everything from desktops to multi-cpu servers to open source all at once. That's inviting trouble.

2. What most companies do is identify applications that support their business and then select an OS based on that. You'll note that nowhere here are any specific apps mentioned. There are comments about "Debian's package repository", but how many businesses are concerned about huge numbers of often obscure *nix apps? Yeah, the secretary will be thrilled with the Debian-supplied copies of awk, yacc, grep, etc.

3. The "unbiased" review went into gobs of detail about speed, but, frankly, most desktop machines are so fast now that the average office worker wouldn't know if you removed half of the RAM and cut the CPU clock speed in half.

4. There was no mention about remote administration capabilities. How many corporate IT guys have no concerns about remote administration?

5. There was no mention of ramp-up time for the (presumably) Windows users or courses available for non-technical staff to learn the UI and apps. Like that's not going to be an issue!

6. Any mention of laptop compatability? Gee, that's suspicious, isn't it? How many businesses have no laptops?

7. There was no discussion of moving data, converting data from the existing format to the new format, etc. What a joke!

The whole piece was written by some Linux fanboy trying to pretend that he's in a corporate IT role. Don't fall for it.

I'm not one of the purists

[b00m3rang]

I don't mind running a few closed source binaries in otherwise open systems. As a result, I have a working video driver written by those who designed the hardware. I've personally had better luck with the nVidia cards, I'm just glad they made the effort.

Besides, more people deciding to run open source OSes because they work with a wide range of new video cards /is/ good for the community.

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[Hatta]

The open source drivers would be just as good if they had the specifications. Doesn't it bother you to buy a piece of hardware and they won't even tell you how it works, which effectively means the company gets to tell you what you can and can't do with it? Is that how a good company should treat its customers?

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[Breakfast Pants]

" The open source drivers would be just as good if they had the specifications." This is untrue. Granted if the specs were available the open source drivers would be a HELL of a lot better and more importantly could be continued to be updated in the future (whereas with these proprietary drivers you can't put any bets on that) but to say they would be "just as good if they had the specifications" shows a blatant lack of awareness for what goes on in the drivers for modern 3d hardware. Having the cards not have full specifications does not mean that if they did have specs it would be as simple as "pump it these triangles in this format and these textures in that format." When you see new drivers released by nvidia in the past that give 20 - 30% performance boosts on some games, well lets just say the drivers are not as simple as you seem to think.

Re:I'm not one of the purists

[be-fan]

The open source drivers would be just as good if they had the specifications.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. The DRI ATI drivers are less than half the speed of their Windows counterparts. The only specifications on those that aren't available is HyperZ, and that could hardly result in a 50% reduction in performance. Also, the DRI drivers aren't good enough to pass any sort of OpenGL conformance suite either. To date, there does not exist an open-source 3D driver that is good as NVIDIA's binary one.

About damn time !

[SILIZIUMM]

An update every 6 months is welcome for sure ! I hope they will sync their release path with the Linux drivers, THAT would be awesome (ie when the Linux driver is avaiable, the FreeBSD one will be (or within days...)).

Re:But freedom isn't equal to being dependant.

[SillyNickName4me]

> One can only hope those "certain hardware manufacturers" aren't the ones that treat you like nVidia does. This is not "support", this is an opportunity to acquire a set of chains. Fans of the open source methodology ought to see how accepting proprietary code isn't going to make your system better--you're choosing to toss out the developmental advantages that open source advocates focus on (or instead not recognizing the limitations in ignoring software freedom for users). The free software community wasn't built by catering to software proprietors and it won't be sustained by giving into them.

That is all noice, and will appeal to people in the Linux/GPL world. FreeBSD does have a free and open source license, but has a different idea about development model, and don't try to express and pursue a political and social goal with their license.

This is not about the validity of your argument, but about the assumptions it is based on, which do not apply to everyone.

Freedom and power

[jbn-o]

This is not about what you can currently do. This is about putting yourself in a position where independence is possible. If you choose to remain dependant when given enough information to behave otherwise, that's a choice that chiefly affects you (a freedom). But not having the information in the first place adversely affects everyone, even those with the skill and will to help themselves and others (a power). Some of us do read ingredient labels on food and cook from recipes because we care about what we eat. Some of us care about industrial processes that affect our air and water (such as plastic production) and, therefore, fight for an increased say in how we get plastic goods.

Not illiteracy.

[nurb432]

Its just that no one cares, since it really isn't important.

Personally I fall into that category.

Thanks, nVIDIA

[agraupe]

I use linux, not BSD, but I imagine the two are close in some aspects. It took me literally a minute to install nVIDIA drivers on my gentoo box, whereas the "integrated graphics" I had prior to that took the better part of a day searching, patching various things, recompiling kernels, and installing. It is good to see that some hardware companies *do* care about open-source support. And I really don't care that the driver isn't open, as long as it's free (beer).

Re:But freedom isn't equal to being dependant.

[SillyNickName4me]

> I think this was the most revealing part of your post

I think you cannot read.

> -- don't dare express yourself politically because we can't handle any of that kind of discussion in here.

Heh, no, just don't assume that everyone who is involved with writing open source software shares the same ideas that are very popular among GPL proponents.

Specifically, when looking at BSD licensed software, as is the case with FreeBSD (just in case you didn't notice yet, we were discussing FreeBSD, not Linux here), you may actually notice that the people designign and writing it don't care that much about 'the open source methodology' but about making something that is usable to everyone. You make closed source software? fine. Makign a card with closed source drivers? perfect, we don't care.

You make somethign wuith a closed source FreeBSD driver? great, if you want it will get listed as a FreeBSD supporting device.

If you think that pointing out the difference between that way of thinking, and the way of thinkign that is very popular among GPL 'fans' is stiffening the discussion, then well, too bad.

I do think tho that you are a bit oversensitive to statements that might be read as being negative with regards to the GPL, and thereby are doign the exact thing that you accuse me of, stiffenign discussion.

Re:what about 5-release or stable when that comes

[brsmith4]

These are all averages over five minute segments, same levels and scenes

Platforms: FreeBSD 5.2.1-CURRENT w/ ports/emulators/linux-base-8 (RedHat 8) vs. Fedora Core 2 w/ vanilla 2.6.7

Card: GeForce2Go 32Mb (Default CPU Clock and Mem Clock, obviously, since nvclock does not support mobile devices)

Quake 3:
Linux: 1024x768@32bit full detail settings 37.45fps
FreeBSD: 1024x768@32bit full detail settings 40.10fps

Endgame (chess screensaver):
Linux: 1024x768@32bit 42.78fps
FreeBSD: 1024x768@32bit 47.50fps

Return to Castle Wolfenstein:
Linux: 1024x768@32bit NVFog, 2xAniso, Full detail 33.40fps
FreeBSD: 1024x768@32bit NVFog, 2xAniso, Full detail 36.40fps

Atunnel Screensaver:
Linux: 1024x768@32bit 47.90fps
FreeBSD: 1024x768@32bit 43.74fps

Glxgears (obligatory):
Linux: 400x400@32bit window 724.20
FreeBSD: 400x400@32bit window 790.00

Its just a theory...

[andreyw]

But I think I know why the (new) FreeBSD drivers are better than the linux ones released some time ago.

Simple - nVidia is trying out something new, and in order to get some testing they choose FreeBSD. If the drivers backfire, there will be less noise from the user-land. They can then always claim -well, its just some problem we encountered on BSD. Think of this as a beta-test. The new linux drivers should be just around the corner :-).

But hey, nVidia has succeeded in making me give FreeBSD a test-drive.