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Open Source Graphic Card Project Seeks Experts
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Nov 28, 2004 12:10 AM
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 250 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
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:False logic (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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...
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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 ;)
Parent
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)
Parent
ati & nvidia release old specs? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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.
Parent
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)
Not a dupe (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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.
Parent
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?
Parent