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,

[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,

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

[brsmith4]

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

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.

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.

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.