From owner-freebsd-mobile Thu Apr 25 20:52:58 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org Received: from mail7.nc.rr.com (mail7.southeast.rr.com [24.93.67.54]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 4F8BB37B404 for ; Thu, 25 Apr 2002 20:52:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from i8k.babbleon.org ([66.57.86.84]) by mail7.nc.rr.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(5.5.1877.757.75); Thu, 25 Apr 2002 23:52:50 -0400 Received: by i8k.babbleon.org (Postfix, from userid 111) id 09A79BB29; Thu, 25 Apr 2002 23:52:40 -0400 (EDT) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Brian T.Schellenberger To: Kenneth Culver Subject: Re: Dell 8200 - NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go - XF86 Date: Thu, 25 Apr 2002 23:52:40 -0400 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.3] Cc: tuc@ttsg.com, freebsd-mobile@freebsd.org References: <200204260200.WAA00709@heimdall.ttsg.com> <20020426020722.36BAABB29@i8k.babbleon.org> <200204252214.33906.culverk@yumyumyum.org> In-Reply-To: <200204252214.33906.culverk@yumyumyum.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Message-Id: <20020426035240.09A79BB29@i8k.babbleon.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Thursday 25 April 2002 10:14 pm, Kenneth Culver wrote: | On Thursday 25 April 2002 10:07 pm, Brian T.Schellenberger wrote: | > On Thursday 25 April 2002 10:00 pm, Tuc wrote: | > | Hi, | > | | > | Just bought a Dell 8200 with : | > | | > | NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go video controller with 64 MB of DDR RAM | > | > That's unfortunate; it would have been better to get an ATI chip (which | > were available upon request for the 7500, 8000, and 8100, at least, so | > probably for the 8200 though I don't know for sure). | > | > But I think you can make it work if you cvsup to the latest ports and | > build XFree86 4.2 from the ports. | > | > nvidia is, in general, bad news, and the best advice is to stay away from | > them if you can. | | I'd have to disagree, there's nothing faster right now, and pretty soon, | they'll have fully supported FreeBSD drivers, as well as the current linux | drivers... It's not true that nothing's faster. My ATI can redraw the screen in a small fraction of second under FreeBSD; as Tuc has discovered, this same operation might take months with an nvidia card. Once the FreeBSD drivers are *actually* out, then the advice might change, though I would still want to "vote with my dollars" for non-proprietary solutions, but that will be a mere matter of principle. Right now, principle and pragmatics both strongly suggest avoiding nvidia cards whenever possible. If I *had* to have the faster graphics, I'd get an nvidia card and dump FreeBSD in favor of Linux, but I don't, so I go the other way. Actually getting nvidia to work under FreeBSD right now is possible but it is *not* easy. I wouldn't do it unless I had a strong reason to do so and I understood what I was facing. | Ken -- Brian T. Schellenberger . . . . . . . bts@wnt.sas.com (work) Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . . bts@babbleon.org (personal) http://www.babbleon.org http://www.eff.org http://www.programming-freedom.org If you smell the smoke you don't need to be told what you've got to do; Yet there's a certain breed, so very in-between, they'd rather take a vote. -- DEVO -- Here To Go To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message