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Originally Posted by ionflux
1) I noticed that my NetBSD installation (with X server working) is also using the vesa driver! So also in that case, even if X works well, it will probably have limited capabilities. I don't need 3D acceleration though ...
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The open source 'nv' driver only supports accelerated 2D and XVideo, they only way to get 3D acceleration is via the proprietary driver released by NVidia.
The 'vesa' driver is a really dumb 'framebuffer', almost nothing will be offloaded to your GPU.. it will steal CPU time away from other applications.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ionflux
2) Can I install FreeBSD i386 on my machine, even if it has an AMD Phenom X4 processor? Would it result in a performance hit?
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AMD64 is just an extension of the original x86 architecture, it can run 32-bit operating systems just fine
As mentioned, NVidia has a proprietary 2D/3D driver.. for FreeBSD (..32-bit) but I don't recommend using it.
Eventually a new reverse engineering project 'nouveau' will replace the 'nv' driver which NVidia barely maintains anymore.
http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://www.freshports.org/x11-driver...-video-nouveau (..found a port, perhaps it'll work?)