Installing nvidia-driver-1.0.9631 from ports.

[budious]

Question about the options provided in the blue/grey console gui. Only the last option for "linux compatibility" is checked by default. I haven't been able to locate much information about the other three options from freebsd or nvidia documents. My main concern is with the first one for "FREEBSD_AGP" and whether or not I should enable this option before "install". Does the nvidia driver install it's own AGP GART driver or does it rely on FreeBSD kernel? What is the better option here?

Hardware:
ULi 1689 AGP Controller
7800GS AGP

Edit: I found the newer 97XX driver in "nvidia-driver" folder and installed it. The install did not ask for for those settings like the 9631 did or else it stored my previous answers elsewhere? Anyways, I get a healthy 4450 FPS in glxgears so it must have gone right. :D

[dracheflieger]

I always find it best to accept what it suggests (it's not always right but pretty much most of the time it is) but there are special circumstances for the nVidia AGP that are explained in their README on their site. I found that the nVidia AGP driver worked better on an old nVidia nForce2 board than did the FreeBSD AGP.

Also, glxgears will give different readings depending on its size as evidenced by this 61898 frames in 5.0 seconds = 12379.593 FPS
61852 frames in 5.0 seconds = 12370.388 FPS
61499 frames in 5.0 seconds = 12299.773 FPS
49444 frames in 5.0 seconds = 9888.209 FPS
6694 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1338.697 FPS
6693 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1338.562 FPS
6690 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1337.811 FPS
51899 frames in 5.0 seconds = 10379.675 FPS
65929 frames in 5.0 seconds = 13185.660 FPS

The higher frame rates are as it opened and the lower ones were on a size change or expanded to full screen.

[budious]

Well I'm suprised that you get numbers in the 12,000 range with a 6800?... but my reading was a constant 4450~ give or take a few frames in each update of the console. Haven't gotten around to gaming much yet so I'll see how it performs in real rendering environment.

[dracheflieger]

Yes, it's an EGVA 6800GS PCI-X . I'm using the nvidia-driver-1.0.9746 and used nvidia-xconfig to set it up. My /etc/X11/XF86Config is pretty sparse but everything seems to work well.

[budious]

I'm going to revive this topic shortly... the reason my frame rates are much below yours is that agp is apparently not working. The agp bus is working in pci mode. Attempting to play a game is choppy and textures are very slow to load. On the tty0 console I get the following message displayed just before KDE loads. NVRM: detected agp.ko, aborting NVIDIA AGP setup!

I found a slightly outdated post about this issue regarding ULi 1689 AGP chipset so it doesn't appear to have a fix as of yet. There was a workaround suggested in this thread but nothing definitive. http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=81758

Any other thoughts that could be tried?[/b]