Open Source 3D Hardware

An anonymous submitter writes: "Open Source haven icculus.org has updated with a new project: Manticore. Different from most Open Source projects however, Manticore is hardware. It is a 3D graphics acceleration design, coded in VHDL. Although still fairly early in development, its goals are similar to those of other 3D cores, from companies like NVIDIA and ATI. The project includes an SDRAM controller for storage, and a VGA unit for display, in addition to the 3D rendering core. It is available under the Design Science License. Source, Documentation and other information available at the Manticore Homepage."

Comments

ditch VGA

[johnjones]

if they ditched the VGA it would be better

simply because you would not have to add all that redundant crap into the hardware

I dont care much for VGA other people do because they are lazy or cant modify their source code (-;

(even MS will be ditching VGA for longhorn)

regards

john jones

Exactly What Kind Of Freedom...

[Lethyos]

...do they have to develop a 3D accellerator that is compatible with most software (OpenGL, DirectX, etc)? It seems to me that many of the design concepts in this arena are mired up in patents by giants like nVidia and ATI. For instance, doesn't nVidia have 'rights' to per-pixel vertex shader techniques?

Re:Success

[brejc8]

All you need is for some one to design a card you can place in your AGP/PCI slot which has an FPGA.

These cards do exist and once open hardware becomes more popular you will be able to download your new graphics card compile it and stick it on your computer.

Or even recompile your card to work better with a perticlular game or video standard.

Re:Success

[brejc8]

I've had 100Mhz designs running. If you pipeline them well then they they can go very fast. I'm currently running Delay Insesitive (DI) Asynchronous designs and they go really fast.

The software can be free from Xilinx but I would prefair an open source project to have a linux version.

The boards we make in the university cost £100 each with a spartan or £300 with a Virtex 300 (damn big I got 14 MIPS R3000 CPUs on one ).
As for the spartan you can still make some cool stuff with it. These are some of the things I made with it.