Weather Channel Sponsors OSS ATI Radeon Drivers

jvmatthe writes "Jens Owen of Tungsten Graphics (mostly former VA Linux/Precision Insight employees) posted to the DRI developer's mailing list with some excellent news about the future of DRI drivers for the ATi Radeon 8500 video card: "The Weather Channel is funding TG to develop an open source 3D DRI driver for the ATI Radeon 8500 graphics card. The driver will be released to the XFree86 Project around Q4 of 2002, to be distributed to the public in future versions of the XFree86 X Server." Presumably this means that this Weather Channel is the one footing the bill for the development. Given that the current Linux support for the 8500 is limited to a binary-only driver that is intended for a related professional-level card, the delivery of an open driver is excellent news. This is also listed at the bottom of the TG project page."

Comments

Weather Channel

[jackh1]

Hi The Weather channel bought about 5000 rackmount SGI O2's a few years ago and now they need replacing Jack.

Re:Weather Channel

[green pizza]

Exactly how powerfull do you think an o2 is compared to an 8500 and a 2 ghz x86 chip for what the weather channel is doing?

On-air weather graphics don't take too much horsepower to produce... especially when "your local weather" is only show about once every eight minutes... much of which is repeat data.

The Weather Channel buys a great deal of model data from various providers and also grinds its own data with several gigantic SGI Origin servers and a big HP box. The rackmount headend machines simply display the data that's been sent to them. Sure, there's some rendering work done before display, but it's pretty basic.

SGI recently announced the end of production of the O2 and O2+.... and there really is no replacement. It only makes sense that The Weather Channel is seeking alternatives, especially cheaper alternatives. Their current system works quite well and they're still upgrading much older machines (the old white text on blue background and low-res non-animated map displays) and constantly tweaking software.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The Nvidia still lacks 10-bit precision in the video overlay which is probably very important for broadcast video work. The ATI 8500 (and 7500) and the new Matrox all support at least that level of precision.

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[foonf]

Look at a GeForce4 MX, the matrox having better 2D quality is now a myth.

I know of no such card. That is, in fact, a chipset. Nvidia does not manufacture any cards themselves. And the problems with 2d quality have never had to do with the chipsets themselves, but with the post-DAC filtering. And this is highly dependent on the board maker. So, there have always been some people whose nvidia-based cards have looked just fine, and others who have gotten crap. It may be that the standards on the reference cards have gotten higher, so that there are more in the first category now than in the past, but it still sounds like it is highly variable depending on board manufacturer.

Meanwhile, get a Matrox card, and you are *guaranteed* top-class 2d output. This is why they are still business, considering the poor performance of their recent parts, and an area in which they still have yet to be bested.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[ianezz]

Why support ATI only?

ATI releases specifications of its hardware to developers.

An open DRI driver for Radeon 8500 (which seems to be completely different from Radeon 8800 wrt 3D) based on specs given by ATI has been in the work for some months, but development has been somewhat slow, and it's not ready yet (2D works fine, though).

In the meantime, ATI also released a (proprietary) driver for Radeon 8800 that seems also to provide 3D acceleration for Radeon 8500.

NVIDIA, OTOH, does not release specs, but only proprietary drivers, so there's little if no hope of seeing open drivers for that hardware no matter how much money is thrown at it.

Personally, when I'm asked what video cards are best supported by XFree86, I usually reply "buy an ATI or a Matrox: both have a long tradition of releasing specifications to developers".

Re:NVIDIA no longer has CRAP 2D output

[HeUnique]

Myth? hardly...

You are more then welcome to check with a percise measurement equipment the output of Matrox VGA out connector and NVidia's one..

Matrox leads on that, even compared to GeForce4

Weather Channel headend rackmounts

[green pizza]

A few points to add to this excellent post...

The Weather Channel's current headend rackmount machines are based on the Silicon Graphics O2. SGI has announced the End Of Production of the O2 and O2+, they will no longer be made as of November 2002. There is no similar replacement. The O2 was/is one hell of a video box... it's performance and capabilites were great for NTSC/PAL resolution video... that's what the box was designed for. But alas, there really is no replacement... The closest thing is the Octane2, but it's almost 3x the size... 2-4x the cost, uses about 3x the power.... and the only video option available for Octane is very expensive as it does mutliple channels of HD and SD video. There really is no O2 replacement.

I'm sure the Weather Channel has bought a few extras (they've already bought thousands) but is seeking some newer/better/cheaper alternative. Because the station, it's workstations, headends, and its network is mostly Unix based (mostly SGI IRIX, some HP-UX), Linux makes sense... especially with some of SGI's opensource offerings (XFS, Failsafe, and others).

What's interesting is that The Weather Channel continues to buy big SGI Origin servers and wiz-bang workstations (Octane2, Fuel) for internal use. It's also interesting to note that they are still in the process of upgrading many of the older headends to the latest (O2 based) hardware and newer software revisions.

I don't think they'll be switching really soon... but it is very cool to see that it's going to be a friendly community effort.

already 2D support for 8500

[unsinged int]

Given that the current Linux support for the 8500 is limited to a binary-only driver that is intended for a related professional-level card, the delivery of an open driver is excellent news.

I think this part is a bit misleading. XFree86 4.2 has support for several ATI 8500 chips, and there are and have been Radeon drivers in the Linux kernel that work with it. From what I remember reading when I got my card working (yes, I'm running an ATI 8500 under Linux with no problems) all of the 2D support is there, and some limited 3D support.

I agree more open source work for this card is good news, but that sentence almost makes it sound like you can't use the 8500 well with Linux at this point.

weather modeling vs weather display

[green pizza]

There are two very different sides to modern weather modeling and display...

1) The acutal hardcore computation (done on huge, non-graphical SGI, HP, and Cray boxes with more GB of ram than I have harddrive space).

2) The on-air graphics boxes that make pretty pictures for television and website weather.

The first requires insane amounts of CPU, large caches, lots of ram, and gobs of thruput between CPUs. The second requires graphics hardware capable of generating television-resolution static images or a few frame of animation from pre-processed data.

Both areas are constantly growing, especially the back-end number crunching. On air graphics continue to become more complex, especially with 3D cloud displays that some weather reports show. But even the SGI O2, introduced in 1996 and ending production in 2002, is more than powerful enough for this task. The Weather Channel is working on putting together a solution to eventually replace their 5000 rackmount O2s located across the country in cable headends generating on-air graphics ("and now your local forecast"). They're also getting ready for HD televison resolutions... something the O2 cannot handle (the Octane can, but that'll cost ya $40K). As a side note, there really is no O2 replacement.... the O2 was a really nifty box for rendering OpenGL direct to NTSC/PAL video out without having to go thru hoops or do any software/hardware hackery.

Weather Channel works with the Navy?

[green pizza]

Check this out, it's very interesting.

http://www.sgi.com/features/2001/dec/fleet_numeric al/index.html

http://www.sgi.com/features/2001/jun/weather/

http://www.sgi.com/newsroom/press_releases/2001/ju ne/navy_weather.html

Ditto

[Anonymous Coward]

And I might add, if you are running an 8500 on Linux, make SURE you get the latest GATOS enhancements from: http://gatos.sourceforge.net.

At the least, these enhancements will fix up Xvideo display, amongst other things.

FireGL 8800 binary driver compatible with radeon

[Anonymous Coward]

I submitted a story yesterday, related to this, but it seems it wasn't important.
The Linux/XFree86 binary drivers from ATI for their proffesional workstation-class card, the FireGL 8800, are compatible with Radeon 8500, since it's based on the same core. Extension-wise, everything that's there in windows is also present on the Radeon 8500 with this driver, and performance is said to be excellent.
This driver is just as good as NVIDIA's drivers.
However, I'm not very fond of non-free binary drivers like this and NVIDIA's, but this is a good temporary solution for all of you who have had to live without 3d acceleration in GNU/Linux until the free DRI drivers have matured a bit.
Hopefully, when the DRI drivers are fully featured, the binary drivers will most likely only work on FireGL.
Cheers.

Re:Doesn't make sense

[naasking]

I might be wrong, but I remember recompiling the NVidia drivers from source. I don't remember looking at the source though, so it might just be a wrapper.

Kernels and modules have version numbers, and a module with the different version no. than the kernel will not load. Thus, to ensure that their binary-only drivers worked in any kernel 2.4.x (or whatever) NVidia probably gave you the object files and one source file to compile and link against your particular kernel. That's my theory anyway. :-)