Open Source Graphic Card Project Seeks Experts

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."

Bloody Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to do 3D work, use an operating system that has been designed for it.

OpenBSD has been designed to be a border network system. NetBSD has been designed for portability and targeted mainly in embedded systems. Sure, you can use them as desktops (and ive used openbsd as a desktop for 5 odd years now), but if you want to do serious 3d work or play games, you use something more suited to the task.

oh my god! ive got a hammer! where are those nails....

Not a dupe

[BumpyCarrot]

Hardly a dupe, since the project has risen from speculation to preliminary specs and a petition.

Re:Bloody Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

"use an operating system that has been designed for it"

We are designing our operating system for exactly what we want. I think you missed the point of Free Software.

Re:Waste of time

[eofpi]

It seems to me that 2D quality and clarity is much more important than 3D performance in their target market.

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.

False logic

[melted]

It's like saying:

"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.

Re:Great Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

You can operate completely in the open without necessarily taking every patch or every suggestion (you know, how most such projects work). And being open from the start assures everyone that if it doesn't make 1.0, there are still pieces for others to salvage, which in turn makes them more likely to contribute in the first place.

Re:Waste of time

[Coryoth]

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

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.

tell how much you would be willing to pay

[frovingslosh]

You can also sign a petition and tell how much you would be willing to pay for the final product.

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?

Re:Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:ati & nvidia release old specs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphic card drivers contain an enormous number of application-specific optimizations, both for games and professional applicaitons. The testing and development behind this is very expensive. No company is going to give away secrets that let their competitiors benchmark faster.

So if you do get a OSS driver, it will be unoptimized, much like the current OSS ATI drivers.

Re:False logic

[pyite]

Your logic is the fallacy. While I can't play Half Life 2 on a Voodoo 3 (or at least I wouldn't want to try), the majority of people could use WordPerfect 5.1 (a great product by the way) for most of their word processing needs. They don't need the close to $1000 price of Microsoft Office. Let's face it, there hasn't been much innovation in Office for years. MS Office is a "moving target" for OpenOffice developers as much as a tortoise is for a hunter. Graphics cards are another story, however.

I'd throw a few bux their way

[multiplexo]

Sure, it might be impossible for them to build a card that is the equal of the Radeon x800 or nVidia GT chipsets but on the other hand these guys are trying to broaden the frontiers of open source software by building some open source hardware. People should be encouraged to do this kind of thing.

Not For Quake

[MBCook]

Sure, this thing probably won't compete with a GeForce 6600 AGP in Doom 3 or HL 2 (that's a $200-$250 card), but do we really NEED that?

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 ;)

Interesting tech...

[Sensible Clod]

while not exactly a GF6800, it does use a FPGA, which may lend itself to some interesting modifications.

I can see it now: custom logic patches to change the core for extra performance on your favorite game...

A New Hope.

[Anonymous Coward]

""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?""

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.

Don't let them turn this into a HURD

[tetromino]

It's better to have a finished product that meets a limited set of goals than an over-engineered design that never gets properly implemented...

Re:"Could this dream... really happen?"

[Anonymous Coward]

>Come one folks, let's get real.

Given that 3dfx was once the king of the 3d world and Nvidia came out of nowhere and ursurped them. Then ATI did the exact same thing with Nvidia. It's not like it has never happened. But that's NOT the point here. This card uses a FPGA, ATI and Nvidia use ASIC's with more transistors than a pentium 4. The point is open-source REPROGRAMABLE card.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Waste of time

[DarthWiggle]

But wait! Assuming that the 3D support from this card will be dog slow assumes that a community project must be dog slow. Ok, OpenOffice doesn't launch as blindingly quickly as MS Word and Firefox (disclaimer: my browser of choice, so this is tempered criticism) doesn't appear instantly like IE, but I think the "market" goals of these two communities was to get something developed that was competitive and then work on optimization down the road.

I'm off-track though: my point is that if the "market" of community developers wants to focus on blindingly fast 3D performance, it's not impossible to believe that it'll happen. What's holding optimal 3D performance from 3D ATI cards on Linux? Seems to me it's ATI being stingy with their support of community developers (which is their right as owners of a property).

Which is kinda what you said. Heh. But if this company has any hardware savvy at all, then there's no reason this thing couldn't compete with ATI or nVidia.

So I guess we're left relying on this co. to come up with some decent hardware, which is pretty much what you said, so I'm just going to shut up and go back to reading about the Reformation. :)

Re:Waste of time

[bwoodring]

Compatibility mode? What are you talking about? The Athlon 64 executes 32-bit x86 code natively, and very, very fast. The Athlon 64 is pretty much the processor to buy regardless of which PC operating system you intend to run.

Re:get it out quickly and create a framework

[Pulzar]

Get the hardware out quickly; if you wait too long, it will be obsolete before you ship.

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.

Re:RTFA/RTFWS/RTFE!

[reality-bytes]

The advantage would be that both the drivers and firmware can be adapted to suit certain needs.

Re:Waste of time

[Slack3r78]

The problem is, 2D compositing is in the process of shifting to being 3D accelerated right now. OS X has been for a couple of years now, Longhorn will be, and X.org is in the process of doing so.

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.

Re:Great!!

[shufler]

It's not stealing if the design is open and available to all.

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!

a big mistake

[osho_gg]

Whoever is doing this isn't in their right state of mind. Open source concepts and advantages simply do not apply to hardware. The reason is very simple: To make a copy of software so that one more user can use it - you just have to download it. To make a copy of hardware so that one more user can use it - you have to actually manufacture a piece of hardware. This fundamental difference just makes it impossible to realistically have a really open source/open specifications hardware. There is a reason why none of the open source hardwares at opencores.org have never been as successful as open-source software.

Osho

A few comments

[tftp]

People mentioned that the FPGA will be used. Very well, this will take care of experimenting. However FPGAs are very expensive. The cheapest (and a fairly small) one can be had for maybe $30; medium sized one, better suited for this task, will cost you about $500. The largest ones cost $10,000 per chip and you can safely forget about even their existence :-)

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.

In a second.

[aquabat]

I'd buy one of these in a heartbeat, just on principle. I'd be willing to spend maybe up to three hundred bucks for the first few iterations.

The way I see it, most of the cost of the latest ATi or nVidia cards is to cover R+D expenses. The fact that the price drops drastically in a year or two is evidence of this.

The advantage of an open source hardware project isn't just that you have documentation for the hardware and can therefore write drivers for it. The real advantage is the same advantage that open source software gives you; namely that you can hack on it and make it better.

Imagine an open source video chip project that you could send design patches to in the same way that you can send patches to the Linux kernel. There could be simulation software to run tests with, and if you wanted some reference chips, you could download a snapshot spec and take it to a fabricator. In fact, there's a business opportunity right there. You could take orders and print chips on a regular release cycle, say twice a year. Of course, I didn't RTFA, but might this not be what this company is proposing?

Sure, it might be a bit expensive now to have chips printed, but if there is a demand for this kind of service, the price will drop and the options will multiply. Eventually, you might be able to buy a kit at Radio Shack that will burn chips equivalent to today's high end graphics chips. And when that happens, there will be this open source (GPL?) chip spec waiting for you to burn, and there will be a driver ready for it when the HURD is finally released.

Re:RTFA/RTFWS/RTFE!

[mark-t]

While there _IS_ a market for 3d card that don't have gaming as the primary focus, these cards are also priced in the $1500-$2000 price range, have OpenGL 1.4 (maybe even 2.0 these days, I haven't looked at them in a while) implemented _entirely_ in silicon, and are the cutting edge choice for serious 3d cad users. Ironically, these cards aren't quite as good for gaming as the nvidia and ati cards are, because of the way games tend to do 3d.

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.

Re:False logic

[nathanh]

It would be impossible for the Open Source world by itself to build a replacement for MS Office in any reasonable timeframe.

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".

Re:Waste of time

[Paul Jakma]

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.

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.

I won't repeat after you

[melted]

Because what you said is stupid. Five to ten people who know what they're doing is enough to put something like this together in two years time, tops. Granted, their product won't give you GeForce 6800 performance in its first incarnation, but these days it has become a lot easier to design custom logic. Besides, they're essentially "standing on the shoulders of the giants", so they already know what _not_ to do.

Re:False logic

[nathanh]

It only took 10 years for all those comments to become irrelevant. ... because IBM and others invested millions of dollars into bringing these things to Linux. Had they not done so, Linux would not have been anything close to the enterprise-class system it is now.

Incorrect. Linux had TCP/IP, SMP, journalled filesystems and lots of advanced features before IBM started paying attention. At least 4 years before, in fact.

It was primarily because Linux was so advanced that the big companies started paying attention. They wouldn't have paid attention if Linux was an unusable toy.

Learn your history.

Won't happen, and this is why:

[haggar]

the hardware industry is based on obsolescence. A company like Nvidia wants to have their -current- and -in production- card to be as fast as possible. Once it's not in production anymore, they don't care. If they released the drivers and (expecially) the specs to the card, someone(s) could improve the driver, and thus make the card perform better, or add a useful property, thus making it more attractive and thus hurting sales of the current card. An opensource driver and specs would also mean that obscure/niche OSs (BeOS, neutrino, skyOS etc.) could be supported by the older card, thus making it moore attractive and....

This, in addition to the very god point made by the poster above.

Re:False logic

[Rohan427]

And it's not anywhere near being ready to replace Microsoft Office, but I guess they've only had 10 years...

Most M$ Office users use only a fraction of the "features" available in M$ Office. Open Office works just fine for 99% of the tasks that 100% of M$ Office users perform.

I have been using Open Office and Star Office for years now with no compatability problems at all. My school requires presentations and .doc format files for assignments, and Open Office does just fine. I also have the need for spreadsheets which also need to be M$ format compatable, and that too works just fine. I can use a number of standard image formats for embedded images/drawings which also work for that M$ product.

In short, don't believe the FUD about OO.org not being ready to replace M$ Office as an office suite. Outside of possibly a few rarely used M$ Office features and obscurities, it's perfectly fine and often superior (it's sure a lot more stable when run in Linux).

To take the argument in another direction, Linux is more than usable and certainly a replacement for those M$ OS's. It's Open Source, has had millions of man-hours put into it, and is far better than any M$ OS (overall). Then there's MySQL, Open LDAP, Apache, etc., etc.

So tell me again why an Open Source 3D video card project can never make it?

PGA

contact HP & IBM

[Goeland86]

You know, with HP and IBM saying they're backing Linux, and HP selling linux laptops, I'd say they should try get help from there. If they're going to succeed, they need a vendor anyway, and what better way than HP's linux laptops? Adapt the chips to both desktop and laptop formats, get a high rate sales like HP and everyone will be happy: the linux community because it'll finally happen, the company because they're making money, and the customers because they've got 100% Linux support on their hardware, which to me is the best price/value to find right now!

Re:Waste of time

[Matthias Wiesmann]

In fact, there is little in OS X that requires 3D support, and OS X uses only a small part of OpenGL. So, a card with good 2D support, antialiasing, and transparency would be just great for desktop use.

I fear that Apple already uses more than what you describe: the screen transitions are full 3D effects and the minimisation effects are done using shaders. I recently went to a talk by Jordan Hubbard and he explained that Apple is planning on offloading more and more processing to the GPU - basically because the processing power was available. If you have a look core image [apple.com] you will see that the features of the graphic card that will be leveraged by Mac OS X 10.4 are well beyond 2D, antialiasing and transparency.

Re:False logic

[adrianbaugh]

It may not be quite ready to replace MS Office, in the sense of a large organisation with lots of Word, Excel etc. files that would need converting (though I can't recall ever having had a problem, even with some fairly macro-heavy documents), but it's certainly ready to take the place of MS Office for a new company without the legacy of old documents. There may be the odd thing that MSO does that OOo doesn't, but you can still probably do it another (better!) way in OOo.

OpenGL Drivers

[gr8_phk]

"Also, the effort required to write an OpenGL driver is significantly greater than writing a DirectX driver."

No one has to write an OpenGL driver from scratch. You just start with MESA and start offloading stuff to hardware as much as you can. It's not a great route to a great system, but it's a straigh forward route to something that works and is feature complete.

Re:When will you /.-ers ever wake up...

[Theovon]

Very funny.

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?