Re: Dell 8200 - NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go - XF86

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 . . . . . . .   [email protected] (work)
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . .   [email protected] (personal)
                                        http://www.babbleon.org

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