



Talking with Timothy Miller 222
barryman_5000 writes "Timothy Miller has written plenty of drivers for the open source effort and now kerneltrap has an interview with him on his newest effort for an open graphic card. He talks about his background, struggle with secretive 3D vendors and more."
Hey Hemos... (Score:1)
Re:Hey Hemos... (Score:1)
Re:Hey Hemos... (Score:1)
Re:Hey Hemos... (Score:1)
There was never a dup, anyone who thinks there was one has commited a though crime.
Linus [businessweek.com] was never seen on the cover of Business Week.
June 2005?! (Score:1)
All we need now is a petition for its support! (Score:2, Interesting)
Y. nVidia are probably the most helpful to the community yet have 2 sets of Linux drivers - the OSS ones and the closed (official) ones.
A: Does the project have an official name?
Timothy Miller: Depends on what you mean by "official". We're calling ourselves the "Open Graphics Project",
cool, now Ill be able to play the doom3 engine with OpenGL and OpenGP ..
All geometry and vertex processing wil
"fully support doom iii" (Score:2)
nonsense. nvidia 6800 series can do it just fine. 6800 ultra can support 1024x768 with full doom3 features turned on, and still get faster than monitor refresh (>100fps).
Re:All we need now is a petition for its support! (Score:2)
This is a bit disappointing. Ever played a game in S/W mode? Nightmare - last century. At least its only a part of the processing though.
It's also a fairly cheap part and well suited to SSE processing. You wouldn't want your processor to be sitting completely idle, wasting all those expensive transisters would you?
Re:June 2005?! (Score:2, Insightful)
And thank you for being the first post to talk about the card and/or article, not spelling or grammar.
In the Article, Mr Miller says he's heard quotes "I'd rather buy a used Rage128 from eBay". When this card becomes available, my Rage128 (Pro Ultra) will be on ebay.co.uk. Just so you can be ready
I don't know if it will actually be an upgrade to my system, or a sidegrade, but
duh (Score:4, Interesting)
This is because the graphics card market depends on vast amounts of R&D and producing a product that is technically superior to everything else out there. Essentially being continually ahead of the game as your competitiors try to catch up.
As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.
duh-IP Security. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:duh-IP Security. (Score:1)
Sure, there's only so much they can do to protect their IP, but why shouldn't corporations have the right to sue the shit out of people stealing their R&D?
Re:duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Thinking that you can hide this precious R&D in software without anyone seeing is nonsense. (The software interface is all that is needed for writting drivers). Your competitor is going to need at most a few weeks more before they dissassembled everything. If that is enough for them to steal your market your card wasn't as far ahead as you thought.
This 'black magic beyond us mere mortals' attitude is exactly what is to blame for this kind of thing spreading. (ie NVidea not releasing specs to their ethernet chip which ofcourse contains a lot of expensive R&D) Most stuff simply isn't as impressive as those companies want you to think.
Jeroen
oh yes, you have found them out (Score:2)
blah blah
Which is why driver software has never had anything to do with the success or failure of graphics cards in the market.
Re:duh (Score:2)
if it's that easy... surely it wouldn't be much of a problem that they don't release the code.
as to the "open source gpu".. it's going to be hideously expensive. chip producing takes real money and is cheaper the more you do them - it's expensive, very expensive. it's easy to come up with the idea for such a product, but to make it happen a
Re:duh (Score:2)
Read the article. It's a FPGA design, not a chip. Or do you prefer to spout first, get caught later?
Re:duh (Score:2)
Re:duh (Score:2)
I find that last part a big unfair. Nvidia and ATI both provide Linux drivers for their cards. I have heard that ATIs suck but they do atleast provide them.
Re:duh (Score:2)
Re:duh (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought that at first as well. But I changed my mind after looking at the design drafts, the card specs, and the quality of the people involved. This is going to be the classic enthusiast's card. It's reprogrammable at the logic level! The uses aren't limited just to Linux video.
The point of this thing is to open it up to widespread hacking. I'll gladly pay considerably more tha
Re:duh (Score:2)
Re:duh (Score:3, Insightful)
How can I possibly write and publish an open source driver to an interface, if that interface us under NDA?
Re:duh (Score:2)
Re:duh (Score:1)
Now what's stopping them from releasing specs for cards which no longer ship (let's say graphics cards that are older than one year)? The problem is really that video cards supported by open source drivers are all 3+ years old (ie. obsolete). The performance gap between competitors is not 3 years; keeping specs secret after the performance gap has evaporated does not protect a company's lead.
Closed-source drivers do not allow for easy debugging/tuning, making t
Re:duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:duh (Score:2)
only if you choose that arena
This Open Graphics Card will kick the ass of its competitors as far as a lot of prospective purchasers are concerned, and I am one of them.
It won't be sat in my XP box running Half-Life but it will be sat in my terminal and get the hours and hours of use it hopefully will deserve.
2048x2048 and up - yay, now that's kicking ass.
Re:duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, that's fine; i don't want the silicon blueprints for their beloved R&D. I just want specs on the interface which lets me use that particular hardware. As much as graphic vendors would like us to beleive, there's not much that can be "stolen" from gfx card specs. Don't take my word for it; just check the ones available for older cards and see how much you can get from there.
I think GFX vendors are reluctant of releasing specs for a number of reasons. One, it leaves them in a controlling position, since they dictate what you will and won't be able to do with your beloved card. Two, some parts of GFX cards might contain licenced technologies (stuff like MPEG decodig, perhaps? texture compression?), but still, we can do without. And three, almost every major GFX vendor has been caught cheating in their drivers (oh, oh, "optimizing"), which leads me to beleive more than one common GFX card might be software crippled. Hell, ATI had a card in which you could unlock four pipelines with a small program.
Desiging GFX hardware is hard, and writting driver is too. Yet, why can't you release specs for hardware we bought? There's an amount of zealotry to the OSS desire of open-source-for-everything, but if anything benefits from open source, that is system drivers. GFX cards or anything else.
Re:duh (Score:2)
But remember that those four pipelines may work *or not* as it is also an easy way to disable faulty units, thus allowing the HW makers to sell at reduced price something which should have been trashed otherwise..
Re:duh (Score:2)
The 9700 -> 9800 ATI softmod was supposed to be doable on 9700s that were, like you said, 9800 with faulty units. I know four people that did this mod and all had the card running just fine - only one had artifacts, and was due to the GPU running much hotter, which was fixed by sticking a larger heatsink. ATI recalled that p
Re:duh (Score:2)
OK, the number of users which disable the protection will be much higher, but I suspect than this number is so small that it's "lost in the noise".
Also this number can't be measured while the cost saving by disabling a functionnality through software vs pushing the chip an additional tool to disable some pins is very easy to compute.
Re:duh (Score:2)
Besides, any company that seeks to save one cent on a fifty dollar cost board deserves the flak they receive when someone hacks the driver.
Re:duh (Score:2)
I need to apologize; i mixed my thoughts a bit here (typed on a rush at work
Re:duh (Score:2)
As for OSS drivers, both X.Org and XFree86 include a basic TNT/GeForce driver with some degree of 2D acceleration but no OpenGL support.
It seems that the only productive answer... (Score:2)
Not necessarily in its first incarnation, but maybe in round 2 or 3, if it gets 1% of the available market either by providing programmability features which the others can't - that get used - or by leaving expensive but seldom-critical parts off to make a cheaper chipset which gets picked up big time by ASUS or some oth
Re:It seems that the only productive answer... (Score:2)
Yet, the reviews [xbitlabs.com] for it [hexus.net] basically conclude it's a promising technology with poor drivers, which on GPU-land can make or kill a product. I still have hopes
Re:duh (Score:2)
They have found a company willing to produce an OSS friendly card, because that market is not taken at the moment. How is that "pooring your R&D down the pan".
Linux,t he BSDs and smaller OSes needs documented hardware. If the big players can't deliver new companies will fill that gap.
iD-eal project for Carmack (Score:4, Interesting)
JC should stick some of his $ behind this project instead of making rockets.
Re:iD-eal project for Carmack (Score:2)
Re:iD-eal project for Carmack (Score:2)
Tim (Score:2)
Alternative OSs (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate this. I don't use an "alternative" OS any more than I drink an alternative to milk or live an "alternative" lifestyle.
I know it's grammatically correct but it's the hidden implication that does my head in!
Minority OS (Score:2)
Re:Alternative OSs (Score:2)
What are you talking about? (Score:2)
Some people these days...
It's not really their fault... (Score:1)
barryman 5000, pleez goo bak an laern Eanglich.
Re:It's not really their fault... (Score:1, Informative)
editor
SYLLABICATION: editor
PRONUNCIATION: AUDIO: d-tr KEY
NOUN: 1. One who edits, especially as an occupation.
2. One who writes editorials.
3. A device for editing film, consisting basically of a splicer and viewer.
4. Computer Science A program used to edit text or data files.
ETYMOLOGY: Late Latin ditor, publisher, from Latin ditus, past participle of dere, to publish. See edit.
edit
SYLLABICATION: edit
PRONUNCIATION: AUD
Re:It's not really their fault... (Score:2)
But I guess that's too much to ask from editors, who do not even check the content (dead links, substance), and continue to post duplicates.
gonna party like it's 1999 (Score:2)
Geometry acceleration was a newfangled, fancy feature five years ago. Something that previously required thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware. Now it's a considered a given, and there is no reason to buy a card without it.
This card is going to suck.
Re:gonna party like it's 1999 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:gonna party like it's 1999 (Score:2)
Yeah, it will suck playing Doom III on this, but that's not the target market.
Re:gonna party like it's 1999 (Score:2)
Then the question becomes "why bother?" If you don't need the most modern OpenGL features in silicon there are cards which are documented quite well enough to have completely open-source drivers. (In fact there are cards like some of the Radeons that actually HAVE some of these features in 100% open source drivers)
It's nice that somebody has a pet project, though.
Re:gonna party like it's 1999 (Score:2)
Re:gonna party like it's 1999 (Score:2)
Which isn't really QUITE the point, the point is, even the substandard (when compared to the binary drivers) open source drivers for some newer Nvidia and ATI cards will offer everything Miller's card is meant to do, cheaper and faster.
It's hard to see what market niche he's filling, aside from the hobb
Re:gonna party like it's 1999 (Score:2)
Re:gonna party like it's 1999 (Score:2)
(I have one, and can confirm that these drivers are more stable than nvidia ones. I did play some quake 3 with them some time ago. Performance is lower that you can get with nvidia though, ie. no doom 3).
I would by this card in a second. (Score:2, Insightful)
NO!
I beleive in Free software, but this is a very personally selfish reason!
I like the PowerPC platform and like to screw around on it. I know that x86 is cheaper and faster, but for what I use a computer for the Ibook is plenty fast.
However I will never buy another mac product again because newer cards are either Nvidia or ATI. The current Ibook has a ATI 9200, which is supported by Open source drivers, which means that it works with PowerPC and x86.
Nvidia and ATI binary driv
Re:I would by this card in a second. (Score:2)
OpenBSD isn't optimised for real performance either, more so security. So perhaps running blender would be better suited by FreeBSD.
But yes, it is x86 only.
Re:I would by this card in a second. (Score:2)
Now, seriously - outside x86 and binary-only drivers people really start to understand the whole purpose of Free and Open.
Thx mods (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thx mods (Score:2)
Re:Thx mods (Score:3, Insightful)
whither sound? (Score:2)
Petition If you're planning on buying one of these (Score:3, Informative)
Let the company know what the demand is.
FOSS (Score:3, Interesting)
These shoddy nvidia drivers really bug me, and it would be nice to see a hardware accelerated opengl X enviroment sometime in the next 5 years (before longhorn), and that is never going to happen unless we can get some real hardware support.
Re:FOSS (Score:2)
A question not asked in the interview (Score:3, Interesting)
Lots of people have done this (Score:2)
Re:Lots of people have done this (Score:2)
Re:Lots of people have done this (Score:2)
I'll buy one (Score:3, Interesting)
- accelerate all the eye candy I enjoy
- make things like alpha transparency and video rendering fast and smooth and not impact system performance
- allow me to manipulate 3D plots or complex CAD objects in three space in real time smoothly
then it does what I need from a graphics card. If it can make bzflag run smoothly, so much the better. And I suspect a middling card with excellent drivers will stack up OK for normal worka against a really fast card with iffy drivers. Plus, if this is a success they might make better cards in the future.
Guys, let's make this the standard card for non-gaming open source boxes. Especially if it's a quality piece of work. That counts for quite a lot, too - solid hardware is a blessing if you don't have the $$ to casually replace it.
Re:I'll buy one (Score:2)
Me too.
Stability and reliability (over time) are the most important features of my linux box. Open source specifications means the product can never be "end of lifed" by the manufacturer. When nvidia or ati decides to stop supporting old cards in their new drivers then you are one kernel upgrade away from an non-functional graphics card.
I'm guaranteed to buy one card to check it out. If it works well, I'll buy one for each of my linux boxes.
Re:I'll buy one (Score:2)
It's going to be able to run a lot of good games. Not Doom 3 or anything that relies on programmable shaders, but it should be able to handle Quake III level engines.
Wireless (Score:2)
It's beginning to sound good (Score:3, Insightful)
But the more I read about this, the more enticing it sounds. I don't play games on Linux at all, so I don't care about that. And to have a nice driver, that is optimized for the new features in X11 like XRender and stuff would rock. The longer I use Linux, the less I want to bother messing around with compiling modules, so I don't even bother using the official NVidia drivers. Sounds like this will perform much better than the generic, 2D only, NV drivers.
Who knows. Might actually buy one of those. But his projected price point at $200 is too high. Even in my best "Stallmanesque" spirit, I can't justify spending over $300 canadian on this card.
Re:It's beginning to sound good (Score:2)
Sentiment seems to running around a $150 price point as a reasonable compromise. I know that for me, $150 versus $200 makes the difference between grabbing one right now or thinking hard about it.
sounds great!!!! (Score:2)
AGP is what everyone wants.
I suspect it is because developing glue logic to talk to the PCI bus is easier than developing glue logic to talk to the AGP bus...
Re:Erm... (Score:3, Funny)
"Has wrote?"
Should be: "Has writed"
Re:Erm... (Score:2)
Re:Erm... (Score:1)
dun writ
-or-
dun writted
would however have been acceptable.
Re:Erm... (Score:1)
At least, that's what my Don King Dictionary says...
Re:Erm... (Score:1)
Re:Erm... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Erm... (Score:1)
Something to remember (Score:2)
Exactly (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Exactly (Score:2)
Re:Grammar, pleeze (Score:2)
I fear you're going to lose your audience of yore with loose use of the English language.
Re:Grammar, pleeze (Score:1)
Re:Grammar, pleeze (Score:2)
Do you even know what an editor is ?
Re:But.... (Score:2)
Re:But.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh for Pete's sake (Score:1)
Re:Yadddaaa (Score:1)
Re:second damn article in a row (Score:2)
nice one.
Re:second damn article in a row (Score:2)
sometimes poor grammar just makes me too annoyed to see beyond the red mist.
Re:Grammar (Score:1)
"Sorry, it's just that seeing
The word "seeing" is a singular noun. It should read "... was too much."
Enjoy!
Re:Grammar (Score:2)
Another way might be that it's a constantly evolving open source project with a practically infinite number of contributers.
You may not appreciate the forks, but that doesn't mean you have to be a dick about it.
Re:Driver's License? (Score:2)
It seems that the ignorance is yours! (Score:3, Informative)
It seems that you didn't read the article and have no idea what this project is all about. None. At all.
I have four words for you (Score:2)