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Open Source Graphic Card Project Seeks Experts
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Nov 27, 2004 11:10 PM
from the will-more-cooks-help dept.
from the will-more-cooks-help dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Could this dream of many open source developers and users finally happen? A 100% open sourced graphic card with 3D support? Proper 3D card support for OpenBSD, NetBSD and other minority operating systems? A company named Tech Source will try to make it happen. You can download the preliminary specs for the card here (pdf). The project, though a commercial one, wants to become a true community project and encourages experts and everyone who have good ideas to add to the development process to join the mailing list. You can also sign a petition and tell how much you would be willing to pay for the final product."
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Technology: Open Source Graphics Card Available For Advance Orders 262 comments
mollyhackit writes "The Open Graphics Project, which we've been following since it first started looking for experts four years ago, has just announced that the OGD1 is available for preorder now. The design features 2 DVI, 256MB RAM, PCI-X, and a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA along with a nonvolatile FPGA for programming on boot. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware which means the graphics card can be optimized for specific tasks and execute them faster than a general purpose CPU. The card could be programmed for certain codecs to speed up encoding or decoding. An open hardware design means potential for better driver support. Of course you could always use the FPGA for something else... say crypto cracking."
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Great!! (Score:5, Interesting)
In theory other companies might steal the design and build and sell the card on their own, but if the design is community-owned, then that actually works to lower prices...
Anonymous Cow
Re:Great!! (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, this is the very point of such a project. If a company comes along and wants to use it for a product they want to develop, then they can!
Parent
Re:Great!! (Score:4, Informative)
Having a straight forward design suitable for an FPGA would enable them add additional fail safe mechanisms and to qualify more easily for these applications. Oh yes, and they get others to work on their products for free. They could use rad hardened FPGAs for the final implementation.
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Waste of time (Score:5, Interesting)
Building a good open 2D card? Mabye... I doubt it's really feasible, but have at it. Chase that dream.
But a 3D card? You are going to make a card to run the latest Quake and Doom? Or even release back of the games? Do you realize how much time, how many thousands of man hours go into these cards? The dollar amount for the simulators, the fabs to make the prototypes, etc
This could however, make a great teaching tool.
I take it back... if the card can target elementary 3D and stellar 2D, it could (in a few years) be THE card to own for a commodity Linux box. Target your audience carefully and don't get caught up in the IdSoftware upgrade cycle! :)
Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
A harder problem is getting enough of the target audience to accept that they're in the target audience, because people (or at least americans; i can't speak for other cultures) like to have the possibility of doing something, even if they'll never do it (hence the ubiquity of SUVs on our roads, but i digress). This should be easier with people that use open-source software though; 3D-intensive software for those isn't nearly as common as on windows.
That said, if they can convince someone to slap it on a PCB, i'll keep an eye out for these things next time i need a video card.
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Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
You end up with much smoother window rendering, and it allows you to add in things like desktop transparency and shadowing without much of a performance hit. A 2D only card may be "good enough" for some, but the desktop environments are quickly moving in a direction where that may no longer be the case by time this card would come to market. Going for at least rudimentary OpenGL support from the start would be a good idea.
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Re:Waste of time (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Waste of time (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, 3D provides a lot more possibilities - you could make windows be actual objects that could be moved forward or backwards, stacked up, leaned against each other, and so on. Implement HAVOC physics so I can grab an icon and smash it into my other icons and watch them scatter all over my desktop, or throw it and watch it bounce off the edge of the screen and land in my network drive.
Eventually, all we'll need to do to solve the spyware problem is to use a wallhack and noclip and go bounce that crap to the curb. Sure, we'll have to endure the cries of spyware makers shouting 'lamer!' or 'wallhack' or 'aimbot', but we can just kick them off the network if it comes to that, or
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Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
Also, Quartz Extreme is most definitely using 3D hardware acceleration. Regular "old" Quartz used before 10.2 was purely 2D based, but Quartz Extreme leverages your 3D accelerator to render the desktop on screen - acting like "Everything is a textured polygon." [udnimweb.de]
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Re:Waste of time (Score:4, Interesting)
When you think about it, Quartz Extreme only needs to handle a relatively small number of parallel polygons at basically a constant distance away. That's a much simpler job than millions of triangles at arbitrary angles to each other at varying distances and whatnot.
The job the video card does can potentially be as simple as figuring out which window is exposed in a given area and grabbing pixels from the appropriate frame buffer. OpenGL is a good deal more complicated than that, but since both the driver and the FPGA are under our control, I would think it would be possible.
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False logic (Score:5, Insightful)
"No, it's impossible to build a replacement for Microsoft Office. Do you realize how much time, how many thousands of man hours went into this software?"
But there you go, Open Office is doing pretty well.
If anything, development of a good "open-source" 3D card could be hampered by patents.
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Re:False logic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:False logic (Score:5, Informative)
The Windows driver for a DirectX card is not that complex - and there are several available reference sources (3Dlabs, ATI). The highly complex drivers out there at the moment are very heavily optimized for a given card - speed sells. But the central core of the driver is simple, with almost all work handled by one entry point that takes command batches.
I ought to know - I'm the guy that designed the Windows kernel interface to the driver back in '97, and it's basically unchanged to this day.
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A New Hope. (Score:3, Insightful)
Repeat after me. Hardware is not software. Software is not hardware
Overestimating is not any better than underestimating.
"If anything, development of a good "open-source" 3D card could be hampered by patents."
I've said as much elsewere. The vorbis people have shown that patents can be dealt with. However graphics is considerably more complex.
Re:False logic (Score:5, Informative)
Talk about "false logic." Open Office is doing pretty well because it has had a huge amount of time and money put into it over the years. By the way, it existed for many years as closed source before it became open source, even before Sun bought it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarOffice
And it's not anywhere near being ready to replace Microsoft Office, but I guess they've only had 10 years...
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Re:False logic (Score:5, Insightful)
I disagree. The same thing was said about Linux back when it didn't have networking, didn't have SMP support, didn't have a journalled filesystem, etc. It only took 10 years for all those comments to become irrelevant. It turns out that 10 years is a reasonable timeframe.
In the same vein, Abiword and Gnumeric, while admittedly not as good as OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, are well on their way to being decent office applications. The KDE crowd also has their own fully-free office suite (Kword, Kspread, etc). If OpenOffice hadn't been donated then the development effort would have gone into the GNOME and KDE applications and they would be further along then they are currently. They would without doubt have been at the tipping point within 5 years; that sounds reasonable to me.
Sun helped the process along, fast-forwarding us at least 5 years, but they did not solve the "impossible".
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Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think there's any requirement for it to be cutting edge. They just said "3D support", not "runs Doom3 at fast as the latest nVidia or ATI card". For a lot of people a card that was capable of running say Quake3 at reasonable (but not necessarily blindingly fast) frame rates would be quite sufficient. Not everyone gets 3D support on a card for gaming purposes, and for those people an open card that provides credible 3D support may be an attractive option.
Sure, you won't compete with ATI and nVidia, but then guaranteed open source drivers that will get the maximum performance out of the card are quite a benefit in themselves. Especially given the quality of ATIs Linux drivers.
There is a market for this card. No it isn't a huge market, but then Apple doesn't have a huge chunk of the desktop market, but they seem to be rolling along fine. As long as there is a big enough niche to support to company, that's all they need. More power to them.
Jedidiah.
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Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the mailing list archive, you'll see that what they are proposing is a card with simple, OpenGL compatible 3D. The interface will be PCI at first. My impression is that they have mini-ITX boards in mind. The last paragraph of your post is correct: they will probably target commodity Linux (and significantly, BSD) boxes.
I think that this is a great idea. Right now, if you want open source 3D, the only good hardware available is the Matrox G400/450/550 line, and that's over 5 years old. I bought my G450 in 1999 and am still using it quite happily, but I would certainly buy an open hardware card from Tech Source if this project comes to fruition.
As someone on OSNews posted, this project could be profitable for a small company even if it would be considered a flop by ATI or Nvidia.
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Re:Waste of time (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm all for open-source hardware products, but lets make them something that isn't already readily available in a form opensource folks find to be generally acceptible. They should at least give the thing *one* major feature advantage (how about quad DVI? noone is doing THAT yet... at least not in any reaso
Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange, my ATi Radeon 9200 RV280's disagree with you.
All of the R100 and R200 family Radeons are supported by the open DRI 3D drivers - type 'man radeon' for further information (including product names), the R300's are not supported though (but are supported for 2D by X). The fastest open-driver supported 3D card is the R200 based FireGL (careful - there's a newer R3xx based FireGL which wont work). There is work underway to reverse engineer the R3xx family and support the 3D features in the open drivers, see r300.sf.net [sf.net]. Also, there is an experimental R2xx Xorg kdrive Xserver featuring accelleration of XRender, and its probably where the work to move the Xserver over to 3D primitives will occur.
Anyway, go stock up on ATi Radeon 9200's. I have two, one AGP and one PCI, running happily on AMD64 and Alpha.
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Re:Waste of time (Score:5, Insightful)
Commodity Linux boxes already have elementary 3D and stellar 2D. It's called Intel Extreme Graphics, has open source drivers, and it costs like $10.
Just want to repeat that $10 figure again. You are a going to have to do better than Fanboyism to beat that.
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Not For Quake (Score:5, Insightful)
For 99% of users, this could be a great card. If it does great 2D, and can do good 3D (especially features like those used in Apple's Quartz, or Project Looking Glass) it would work more than well enough. Lets face it, for a large number of applications, a GeForce (origional) quality 3D would be MORE than enough for most anything many people would do. And if the graphics are localized into a small area (say a little 200x200 area of a window), then even such a card would be able to render very nice looking graphics (just like a "slow" card could run Doom 3 looking great at such a low resolution).
I'm with you. For a quality, commodity card this could be great. Plus, with the FPGA, not only could be hack the DRIVERS, you could hack the FIRMWARE! Think! You could buy the card, and write software to take the burden off the CPU for decoding MPEG2 or 4. You could even (with a little kernel help) swap firmware on the fly so you could have that video decoding, and then enter a command (or press a button on your desktop) to have the 3D firmware put in. When you're done, go back to video decoding acceleration.
Hell, make it run SETI in the background at super fast speed when just using 2D (like using nVidia cards to do scientific calculations on the GPU).
These things could be a LOT of fun to mess around with. I think I just sold myself on one ;)
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Great Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Really what a project like this needs is the developer to shut out the open source community, until the project is done. If linus had made a large project out of the original kernel, I seriously doubt if it would have ever been completed. This should be kept simple, and then open sourced, only once there is a good code base to build from.
Don't let them turn this into a HURD (Score:5, Insightful)
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ati & nvidia release old specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:ati & nvidia release old specs? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Won't happen, and this is why: (Score:4, Insightful)
This, in addition to the very god point made by the poster above.
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Yay! It has an FPGA on it. (Score:5, Informative)
I think the company would make a ton of money just making these as a reference platform and selling them to University students looking for a way to program their own GPU on the cheap for research purposes. Heck, Xilinx should do it themselves, and give all these students exposure to Xilinx parts (and their crappy design software) before they even find out who Altera is.
This project looks interesting. I'd sign on to help out, but this gets dangerously close to what my Day Job is, and I don't think my management would smile on my participation...
tech source isn't some n00b company... (Score:5, Informative)
tell how much you would be willing to pay (Score:5, Insightful)
Wgat sense does this make. There are some people (not me) that might pay up to $500 for the newest ATI or Nvidia cards. But they do that with the knowledge that the hottest 3D applications will take advantage of them. More importantly, that is the price they might pay for those cards today. It's well known that in six months those cards might be worth half that, in a year perhaps around $100. How can anyone say how much you would be willing to pay for the final product when by that time it might not even compete with the $100 cards?
"Could this dream... really happen?" (Score:3, Interesting)
Come one folks, let's get real.
I'd throw a few bux their way (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting tech... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can see it now: custom logic patches to change the core for extra performance on your favorite game...
get it out quickly and create a framework (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:get it out quickly and create a framework (Score:5, Insightful)
It's already obsolete. It's on par with cards from about 6-7 years ago, if they achieve everything in their spec. It's only good enough as a teaching tool.
You can charge a little more than a comparable regular graphics card, but not a lot more. If this becomes a premium custom hardware product, it's dead on arrival.
A comparable graphics card costs $10 if you can even find it these days.
I don't see how this is worth the effort when you can buy the cheapest ATI card, and use the generic open-source VGA driver and achieve better 2D performance. This is somewhat like somebody trying to get people to work on an open-source version of DOS. Sure, you get your freedom of the free software, but who would want to use DOS? I'm all for open-source, but it has it be at least remotely competitive to get somebody to look at it.
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What about OpenGL, 3dFX and gameing? (Score:5, Informative)
The first is that these are respectable specs - providing you don't want to to any gaming.
I think that is a really important caveat. I know that every once in a while people get all excited because the usual suspects port there games to Linux - you know ID and Blizzard come to mind.
It is a good thing that these two companies do this, but it is a bad thing that there are really only two companies that do this with anything approaching reliability.
Thing is... a card with these specs, especially considering that it is a year if not more away from reality will never cut it for any sort of gaming. You are going to produce a card with 3D support that doesn't have the muscle to handle any 3d games that are produced.
If you are fine with that then there is nothing wrong with those specs. This card will be able to handle email, porn and movies as well as anything ATI produces.
My 2nd thought is a bit more practicle.
Actually there may not be anything practicle about it. Might just be wishful thinking really.
What about 3DFX? What about OPENGL?
Between the two things isn't half the work already done?
I know it might seem insane - nuts even, but back in the day 3dFX had some very respectible hardware. They didn't fail cause there stuff was poop, they failed cause they underestimated nVidia (which in turn underestimated ATI). The hardware is still out there, the code is still out there. It just isn't being utilized.
Would there be anything wrong with utilizing these old resources to achieve this goal?
Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
A few comments (Score:5, Insightful)
FPGAs are also slower than ASICs. This, and the cost, are the reasons why commercial manufacturers use ASICs. You may have a great design, but if it is limited by the performance of your FPGA you lose.
FPGAs are designed to be universal, and to do that they feature programmable interconnects. But the number of those interconnects is limited, and many FPGA designs are thus constrained. You may have plenty of gates left and no way to get to them... With ASICs this is not a problem because if you need a wider bus you build it there, on your own silicon. In FPGAs the busses are already there, and you can't add more.
Yet another concern is tools. Xilinx, for example, offers a free download of some bare minimum tools. They work OK if you are making a door lock with RS-232 control. But they fail miserably, to the point of being unusable, on a complex design - which this one is. Better tools, such as Synplify, will cost you your yearly salary. How many developers have access to that kind of tools? And once you switch to some specific tool you are committed.
Finally, there is a problem with skills of developers. There are many s/w developers who are very good with C/C++. But not that many are good with Verilog (and its wickedly evil predecessor, VHDL :-) Hardware design is very, very different from software design. And you can't debug it, you only can simulate it. Simulation tools, such as ModelSim, are absolutely not free on the level that you need for this design.
To summarize, this project can be done, but not by a bazaarful of people but a small, dedicated band of wizards who locked themselves up in a small cathedral. Even if these wizards release their works, none of mere mortals will be even able to open their files, since the tools to do that are not free.
And besides, why would any sane person, who is not burdened with FOSS thoughts, want to buy such a card even for $100? This cash buys you a decent entry-level Quadro, and if anyone suggests that this design can beat Quadro I won't believe that...
And if anyone wants a real entry-level card, then it can be had (Vanta TNT2, for example) for $10 in any bargain bin, at many places. Beat that first.
Re:A few comments (Score:5, Informative)
I'm actually quite surprised that they're opting for a Xilinx FPGA here; I must be missing something. Is there any particular reason that reprogrammability is more important than cost and speed for this?
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Trend: Graphics Cards become General Purpose Cards (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the thoughts expressed by experts are that 3D cards may become general purpose parallel computing cards.
If it weren't for bottlenecks in the AGP bus, it would be possible to use 3D cards of today for more general purpose computing (I'm fuzzy on what the actual hold ups are here...timing issues?).
There have been Slashdot discussions about using the graphics card for audio processing, because audio is usually less than a 32 bit stream. The problem is that audio and often general purpose computing have "real time" requirements.
Also, make sure your open source card supports ARB_fragment!
Re:Dupe! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dupe! (Score:4, Funny)
Hahahaha! Oh I'm a pathetic shell of a human.
+5 Korny!
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When will you /.-ers ever wake up... (Score:4, Funny)
TRANSLATION OF TRANSLATION: All the fruit of your labor are belong to us.
TRANSLATION OF TRANSLATION OF TRANSLATION: You've been 0wned, l00zer.
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Re:When will you /.-ers ever wake up... (Score:4, Insightful)
But seriously, it's not fair to criticize them for what they are doing. For a very long time, user of open source software have whined and complained about the derth of open-spec hardware.
Here, a company has come along, offering to give the people what they have been asking for. You see a problem with that?
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Not a dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
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RTFA/RTFWS/RTFE! (Score:5, Informative)
If you'd read-up on this subject, you'd have seen that these folk *do* know their hardware.
They are also not being overly ambitious. While they expect to be able to develop a card which has 3D accelleration for desktop applications, they make no bold claims about gaming.
Indeed, this card is being designed as the ideal desktop-card for open-source systems with open-source drivers and firmware. Any gaming performance, while unlikely, should be treated as a bonus.
I have already pledged my intention to buy one of these cards just out of curiosity.
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Re:RTFA/RTFWS/RTFE! (Score:5, Interesting)
Falling anywhere short of, say, OpenGL 1.4 support would make it pretty much useless. In other words, it doesn't have to have pixel shaders, but it has to have good, filtered texture mapping, lighting, alpha, quite a bag of stuff. The Spartan 3 (not III as the tech spec suggests) has 1.5 million gates and 384 MHz, which ought to be enough for a decent 3D core, with one catch: it's got 32 18x18 multipliers, no dividers. Don't even think about floating point, obviously, but without dividers, perspective interpolation is going to be pretty tough. Without perspective interpolation... well, think "1970's".
I just hope there's a standard way of getting around this. Any hardware hacks out there?
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Re:RTFA/RTFWS/RTFE! (Score:5, Interesting)
Odds are that your CPU doesn't have a divider on it either.
Google for Newton-Raphson.
Fast hardware dividers are big and expensive - somewhat more expensive than a multiplier. But if you have a multiplier and you're not too concerned about performance, or are happy to tradeoff precision for performance, then you can do division using your multiplier, a small seed ROM and a microcode engine.
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Re:RTFA/RTFWS/RTFE! (Score:5, Insightful)
So if they aren't competing on the gaming front, and I highly doubt they'll be able to compete on the CAD front for the price they're expecting to sell the card for, then I'm afraid this idea is going to be dead before it ever really gets a chance to start.
So if they're not shooting for ati or nvidia levels of performance... are they seriously thinking they'd be able to put out a card that could compete with the wildcat realizm cards for around $200? If so, I'd sign up, even if that's not the best card for games. As it is, however, I can't sign the petition in good conscience knowing that if the product couldn't compete with what's already out there, I'd just pass it up for something else that better suits my needs. I don't make enough money to be able to buy things I can't really use.
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