[BrainStorm]

Anybody know if the graphics hangups in FreeBSD would make it a bad choice for a CATIA5/SolidWorks/AutoCAD build?
Just figured it's faster and easier to ask than to learn from my own long, drawn out mistakes.

hw: Compaq Evo w8000; 2x 2.8GHz Xeon; 3x 36GB 15k rpm U320 in RAID0; nVidia Quadro4 900xgl AGP graphics

[matyas]

Do any of those programs even run on FreeBSD?

[drjohnnyfever]

I use FreeBSD quite extensively both at home and at work and I've found a great many Linux-Binary-Only or commercial Linux software works extremely well using FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility. If it runs on RHEL/CentOS 6 or RHEL/CentOS 7 your odds are very good it will work with minimal hassle on FreeBSD. I've never tried AutoCAD or the like but I do use some interesting things like Microsoft's PowerShell for Linux, the Linux version of Chrome.

[BrainStorm]

The LINUX binary compatibility is exactly why I'm liking FreeBSD, even though OpenBSD would be far more forgiving of old hardware. So what do you think of the graphics support/performance? I do have the certified nVidia BSD driver for my Quadro4 cards.

[drjohnnyfever]

Using an Nvidia card with the official Nvidia driver it should be broadly similar in performance to Linux with the same card as far as OpenGL goes. The Nvidia driver brings along its own opengl stack that is mostly the same between Windows/Linux/FreeBSD. At least as far as I understand it. 


For other-than-nvidia graphics its not quite as nice in general but a lot of new Intel stuff works fairly well.

[BrainStorm]

I was hoping that would be the case. So it's really more of a driver/GL support issue where the so-called plug-n-play built in video cards are having problems, from what I've gathered. I guess it'll be another fun project crapping up my house for a bit. But I sure do miss my Evos. After the initial XP EOS announcement, I opted to try the supposedly successful Win7 installs with whatever tweaked files came with each, and long story short, I lost my XP installation before I ever got anything working. Now I need RAID controller batteries, and I'll be lucky if I can even get the internal array configured the way it was setup and recover my stuff...
I will keep notes of progress here. Maybe someone else is as hardheaded as I am.