NVidia, SGI, and VA Linux Working on OpenGL

Milkman Ken writes "I just received an email from NVidia's Dave Schmenck about this press release about VA Linux, NVidia, and SGI collaborating on a 100% OpenGL 1.2-compliant graphics subsystem for Linux. According to the press release, this graphics subsystem should make OpenGL apps as fast or faster than they are currently in Windows. They're going to be demoing it during LinuxWorld in Feburary. "

Comments

Re:What about Precision Insight and the DRI?

[pp]

Well, DRI is just another way of getting to the hardware, which actually needs help from the kernel to work. On top of that is the GLX layer (which can be a open sourced driver from someone or a closed source one from someone else). On top of that is the OpenGL library, which can then be either Mesa or a real SGI OpenGL. You should be able to switch any of these components with another one and the entire system should work.

Not that you necessarily need to have GLX in the middle (could be glide or software), but SGI certainly seems to use it in all their stuff, so I'd assume they're not skipping it. It also lets you use 3d apps through the network just like 2d apps.

So, even if they did closed source OpenGL 1.2 implementation that they sold for $$$ you could just replace it with Mesa and in the worst case suffer from a few glitches (most likely it'd work just perfectly as the main author has access to the official opengl test suite)

at the risk of going totally OT...

[ywwg]

I think aardvaark here is right. It's not how often it crashes, but how well the system recovers. When Windows crashes (which it does, even on a "clean" system), you want to pull your hair out. When linux crashes (ususally because you did something wrong :)), the program dies and you are safe. My computer time has been much less stressful and exasperating ever since I stopped using windows.

Mesa?

[octover]

Why not just pay for Mesa to get a license and provide programmers to help Brian Paul? Its great that we will have an OpenGL library that can name itself as OpenGL compliant, but why not support the project that is already there. After all Mesa is not vaporware/idea, there already is a lot of good code that is OpenGL complaint (while not being able to say so due to the licensing crap).

It's about the Quadro, not the GeForce

[Webmonger]

You'll notice that the words "workstation" and "professional" figured prominently in this announcement, while games weren't even mentioned.
Nvidea's Quadro, the big brother to the GeForce, is the real cause of this initiative. The Quadro does to SGI hardware what Linux did to Solaris and all the proprietary *nixes. It made it work on commodity hardware, and made it cheap. You'll

NVidea would have to be braindead *not* to get the Quadro working on Linux. Like Linux, it's a (much) cheaper alternative of comparable quality.

What I don't understand is how VA and SGI figure in this. Surely SGI realizes that the Quadro could hurt them badly.

Good, but not great.

[ABadDog]

Notice the conspicuous absence of the words "Open Source". It looks like this will be based on SGI's source, not Mesa, and therefore closed. Hopefully, nVidia's part will be open enough to help the Mesa/XFree team.

Re:Good, but not great.

[deaddeng]

Oh, please give us a break! I don't care if it's "Open Source" right now, as long as it moves Linux into serious competition with NT and IRIX as a 3D graphics workstation platform. The friggin' lawyers will hash out the "Open Source" implications for the next two years (or more) do you want to wait that long?

The thing I find interesting is the same names popping up in the stories--SGI, NVDIA, RedHat, and Precision Insight. Take a look at the Precision Insight team (http://www.precisioninsight.com/our_team.html) and tell me that these guys are not dead fucking serious--the added Brian Paul, who wrote the MESA library. This week, they added Dave Dawes, co-founder and President of XFree86. Does this sound like a closed source-oriented team to you?

As for Nvidia--they have come lightyears in the past six months in terms of drivers--including for the GeForce256. And who do you think helped designed the core of the GeForce and the Quadro? It has "SGI" written all over it.

Precision Insight is writing great chunks of the hardware acceleration layer for XFree86-4.0. SGI and RedHat are paying for it. SGI and NVidia are designing the GeForce and it's successors, and they are making a major commitment to Linux.

At the end of the day, the only things that are going to be sucking are 3dfx (checked their stock lately?) and possibly IRIX. The next two years are going to be amazing in terms of Linux's emergence as a professional graphics workstation--fully supporting the next generation of cards/chips with full T&L and AGP 4X implementation. And the whining "Open Source" religionists will have SGI and Nvidia to thank.

Re:Good, but not great.

[Ian Schmidt]

You're missing the point by about 10 miles. Assuming you aren't simply astroturfing (and the bit about "productive and functional" makes me wonder), sit back and learn.

It's been proven time and again that in the case of video drivers, open source wins every time. 3Dfx, ATI, and Matrox have all opened up specs for their cards (if not actual code), and all have benefited from the ongoing work on the utah-glx code and their drivers. Not only that, the common codebase for things like Mesa means cards can be as equal as possible given their hardware. A fix for the ATI Rage Pro can magically propagate to the G400 driver.

Contrast with nVidia, who currently ship abysmal drivers (partial texture uploading is horribly broken, for instance, which breaks a very interesting application I'm beta testing). Source is indeed available for these drivers, but it's been obfuscated into uselessness so nobody can read it, let alone fix it. Presumably this is related to the ongoing patent lawsuits against them - they would appear to have something to hide at the register level.

As a simple result of being effectively closed source, nVidia not only has the worst and slowest Linux 3D support of any graphics board maker (the open-source ATI Rage Pro driver, for a hideously bad old chipset, kills the TNT on Quake3), but they're going to have to rectify the situation themselves. Note the contrast: if you're open, smart guys like John Carmack will fix your drivers and everyone will think you're cool because of his and others' work. If your closed your drivers are only as good as your last release, and you get blasted for bugs, particularly if you leave 6 months between releases as nVidia has.

Finally, as far as Star Wars, we aren't the ones being hurt by the disadvantages of closed source there - LucasFilm is. Movies can be and have been rendered on Linux (Titanic being the usual example), and it makes no difference to us the viewing public, it's just more uptime for the animators.

Re:Finally, Games!

[d^2b]

Ahh, what the hell, this is no more offtopic that what it replies to:

Oh, and btw: if you have everything configured properly, have good hardware, and do not run buggy software, windows is alot more stable for a desktop user than many here give it credit for.

I agree that if you grew up with DOS, you might thing that this was satisfactory. For many people though, one of the most important functions of the operating system is protection from buggy software. peace d^2b

Re:What about Precision Insight and the DRI?

[franklamonica]

Thad,
The DRI is already available in the work in progress branch of the upcoming XFree86 4.0 X Server. So far we have released a driver for the Voodoo 3, but DRI compatible Intel 810, Rage 128, and G400 drivers will all be released by March of this year. You are correct in your statements about the upcoming driver capabilities, and they will ALL be fully open sourced.

PI uses Mesa, an implementation of the OpenGL API, to bring freely available, open source hardware accelerated 3D to Linux. The open source distribution mechanism and general open source philosophy cannot tolerate the requirement for any licensing fees, so PI and Mesa cannot make any claim about OpenGL conformance. We do have an open source project underway called "Glean", which provides an infrastructure for creation of fully open source test routines that will provide whatever level of 3D verification and testing that is required by open source users. Because all Mesa work is open sourced, anyone who discovers a problem in Mesa can either fix the problem or report it to Brian Paul so that he can make the fixes. We believe that between the work PI is doing, and all the work of many open source developers, Mesa will reach the highest possible level of 3D performance and quality within the industry standard XFree86 X Server.

I agree with you that there will be an explosion of interest in 3D under Linux. We will always welcome any opportunity to work closely with SGI and any IHV, to improve the availability, quality, and performance of open source 3D.

Not Open Source?

[nellardo]

True, the release doesn't explicitly say "open source", and with the hype on those two little words, you'd expect them to say it if it applies.

I see two possibilities:

• The three companies plan to open source it, but can't agree on a license.
• SGI doesn't want to open source one of the few real "assets" it has left, i.e., the OpenGL implementation.

If we're lucky, their lawyers are just dicking around with which license to use. VA Linux would probably want GPL or LPGL, while SGI and NVidia would want something more restrictive.

However, I'm more apt to believe the latter - SGI doesn't want to open source OpenGL until it absolutely has to. Once OpenGL is source-available, SGI has very little IP left of any value. At least, that's how the corporate lawyers will think.

This may seem like a Bad Thing®. However, functionally, I don't think it will matter as much as we might think. The runtime will have to be free (albeit not open), and the APIs are essentially free, as they're widely published and SGI wants you to write to their code. With dynamic linking, you're free to choose either this (closed) OpenGL (cue rimshot) or Mesa. You'll use whichever one is better. And that will drive the other to improve. "Free Market, Baby! Yeaahhh!"

I suspect that eventually, it will end up being open source, if only because demand will be so great.

Finally, Games!

[Ferzerp]

Heh, well there are games now, but the performance doesn't really compare to windows counterparts. 3dfx drivers come close, but who wants to only have 1 choice (and that being a company who just continues to rest on its laurels and doesn't make anything really new). At least now we will have two choices. Actually, in truth, were it not for games, I would likely have scrapped windows a long time ago.

[rant] Oh, and btw: if you have everything configured properly, have good hardware, and do not run buggy software, windows is alot more stable for a desktop user than many here give it credit for. Crashes? What are those? Seriously though, my system stays up generally until I leave on the weekend, or get angry at having to listen to it one night. Linux, well, linux crashes too. For the same reasons. Buggy drivers, bad software, etc. It's all about how you configure and maintain your system.


Yeah, windows sucks, but not nearly so much as a linux zealot would have you believe. Linux sucks too. They both suck in their own ways. That's why I use both. Use each in what it doesn't suck at! [/rant]

Re:Ironic?

[slashdot-terminal]

Does anyone else find it ironic that the company that makes the video with the absolute WORST 3d in linux is supposedly working on a fully compliant OpenGL subsystem?

A little question for you exactly how is it the worst thing? Could anyone give me some data besides quake3 benchmarks? I sure would like to get the straight dope about video cards before I waste a bunch of money on them.

Is there an ISA version of any decent card? Might be nice.

I find that hard to believe given their apparent apathy to the current linux market.

So does that mean that there isn't any decent preformance with that video card? Or do they not publish something really neato like various printer manufactureres.

Re:Don't judge NVidia *too* harshly

[Artie FM]

I've tried to get more specifications for the chipsets so that the Utah GLX driver could be made to use DMA, but they've told me that the specs are too complicated for people to understand and they would rather spend their resources developing their own driver than supporting everyone and their sister who wants to learn the specs.

Did they get that line from CmdrTaco? It sure sounds like him.

(I'm only joking, don't get all huffy and puffy andover guys)

But seriously I think this topic is the next battle front for open source software. We've proven that you can open source code, benfit from the work of the community and still have a valuable company. What has not been proven is that you can release completely unsupported unintelligible, embarassing source code and still profit from it. Both large companies and individuals talk about open source but they really mean only after they clean it up.

As a programmer myself I know how tough it is to go through bad code and fix it or make it work. But I think most people are wrong when they express this need to clean things up before the public sees it. Two main reasons are that:

1) You don't have to support my grandmother trying to hack your code. Just me. I'll be satisfied with a mailing list that other hackers use too.
2) By delaying until after the cleaning there is a danger that the code will never be released. Priorities always change, alternatives may be released, anything could happen.

Does anyone out there have examples to back me up or disprove me?

Re:Ironic?

[vanza]

Well, I do not understand fully what happens, but the fact is that the performance of NVIDIA cards under Linux is driver limited. That means that the card has potential, but the drivers lock it to the current level of performance (which is quite low compared to the other cards).

The reason for this, as explained several times in the Utah-GLX maling lists (http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net, as far as I remember) is that the NVIDIA drivers can't do DMA, and the absence os low-level specs prevent the developers from modifying the drivers so that they can profit from DMA, just like the other ones (based on the released specs from Matrox, ATI and S3 up to now) do.

So, unless NVIDIA open the spec for their chips, or come with a DMA-enabled drivers, not much can be done except wait.

--
Marcelo Vanzin

Clarification

[Kit Cosper]

VA is working with nVidia on the drivers in much the same way that Precision Insight
did the work with neoMagic some time ago.

A binary-only driver will be available with a shim to enable the interface with XFree.
It is our hope that the source will be releasedat some point, as we are actively promoting
the benefits of Open Source with the parties involved.

As an alternative to using the binary only driver we plan to qualify the GeForce with the
existing Open Source TnT driver. However there is a performance increase with
the binary-only nVidia driver.

It is my understanding that the drivers will be available free of charge. I don't have any
new information on the status of OpenGL.

Hope this helps to clarify exactly what is going on. If you have any further questions
please email me or Chris DiBona and we'll do our best to get answers for you.


--Kit
cosper@valinux.com

Re:Absolute worst 3D?

[Caballero]

No, that's not true about the Alpha. I do have one, and started playing with a port. I would have needed to get a different license from 3dfx, but since I never asked for it, they never gave me one. I don't think there would have been any problem, just a little time/hassle involved.

Although nVidia did release something that could be called open source, the state of the code made it very difficult to use. It was run through a preprocessor. To me that doesn't count.

- |Daryll

free software vs pay software

[vyesue]

you know, I'm a little confused by the inability of people to understand that some people don't choose to give their software away for free with source. why is this a bad thing? why all the hostility towards people who want to develop and market and sell a quality product? if these people are putting significant effort into creating software and free source doesn't fit into thier business model, why automatically discount this software as BAD and why characterize the companies who develop it as TURNCOATS? why can't you just accept this as another option for people who want faster GL?

What about Precision Insight and the DRI?

[Thagg]

SGI and Red Hat together funded a small company called Precision Insight to write the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, to allow users to directly access the OpenGL hardware on their graphics boards with minimal overhead. The DRI would allow the accelerated rendering in a X Windows environment. This DRI is part of XFree86 4.0 and is due out Real Soon Now.

Precision Insight is also working on drivers for a bunch of cards; with the cooperation of the card manufacturers. These should also be released soon.

With the release of XFree86 4.0, the DRI, and these drivers, everyone will be able to have workstation-class graphics on Linux. I believe that most of these drivers, and certainly XFree86 and the DRI are open source, too.

My question is; why is SGI persuing a different approach now? I am sure that their solution will be have spectacular performance (when it is finished...SGI has been notoriously late in many of its plans).

The press release says nothing about whether the announced systems will use XFree86, the DRI, and whether they will be open-source (although I'm certainly that the NVidia drivers will not be open). It's almost as if SGI was going to try to steal the thunder of the upcoming release of the free software; which, I believe, will be an earth-shattering explosion of interest in 3D.

thad

Don't judge NVidia *too* harshly

[Milkman Ken]

So here's the deal. I've talked a lot with NVIDIA folks about the lack of good 3D drivers under Linux. They are sympathetic. This is why this driver is going to be released.

The driver will definitely be closed source, as it is using a licensed version of SGI's OpenGL implementation. They obviously cannot open source this.

The word I've received from them is that the fast, DRI driver will be out sometime after XFree 4.0 is released. The latest beta (3.9.17) did not include any hardware acceleration of all.

I've tried to get more specifications for the chipsets so that the Utah GLX driver could be made to use DMA, but they've told me that the specs are too complicated for people to understand and they would rather spend their resources developing their own driver than supporting everyone and their sister who wants to learn the specs.

Whether you agree or disagree, you must remember one thing: it is completely up to NVIDIA as to whether they want to release ANYTHING. They have been very accomodating to those open source advocates (and zealots) who demand drivers. They have released enough specs and source to create a driver from, and the only big thing lacking is the DMA stuff. I agree that they should have released the full specs a long time ago so that the GLX group could have a better driver for us by now, but by now it's a moot point as we will have a badass driver in a month or so.

And for those anti-NVIDIA-pro-Matrox-types, don't give Matrox THAT much credit. Mark Vojkovich, who I believe originally worked to get Matrox to release the specs that they have, posted the following to the Utah GLX dev list: Matrox have not released full specs for the card. They also haven`t contributed anything along the lines of source code and very little along the lines of support. I think people give them too much credit.

Re:Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy !!!

[TandyMasterControl]

Will you buy a whole VA Linux rig to get it? I am sceptical along with some others that this will benefit "Linux users" anymore than the existence of fully OpenGL modules for XiGraphics. Maybe even less. XiGraphics requires you to purchase some software. This press release (hinted at on MaximumPC site yesterday) sounds to me like VA's bid to produce an essentially proprietary workstation platform which is based on, but not sharing with, Linux. I don't fault them for doing it, but I doubt I'll benefit from this move despite the fact that I own a TNT2.