[ninjin]

Thank you for correcting me. Nothing to add in terms of AMD. But I could have sworn that there was a set of “demands” in terms of features from NVIDIA around the time I used FreeBSD on my desktop (~2010) in order to produce binary drivers back then. Perhaps I am misremembering?

[magic_quotes]

That would be the amd64 driver port: https://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests. For comparison, the first x86_64 driver version for Linux seems to be 1.0-4499 (https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86-64/1.0-4499/) from 2003-09-02.