NVIDIA Cg Compiler Technology to be Open Source

Jim Norton writes "This announcement from nVidia states that their Cg compiler technology for 3D applications will be Open Source and available under a free, unrestrictive license. The ETA for this is in August and will be available here." The linked company release says it will be under "a nonrestrictive, free license," but does not give further details. BSD?

Comments

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Proliferation

[Anonymous Coward]

If they want Cg or whatever to become widely used it kind of has to be open in this day and age.

Re:Proliferation

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like your mother's legs.

If you like it

[mc6809e]

Money talks. If you like what they are doing, tell them you like it by buying one of their cards.

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only they would do the same with their drivers! It would be great to have open-source Nvidia drivers, so *BSD and non-X86 users can enjoy 3D acceleration, too.
Until then, I won't buy one of their cards. Period.

Re:If you like it

[The Rogue86]

They dont need to open source to port it to *BSD. But it would make developing simpler. It seems you have fallen victim to the assumption that closed source is evil. It can be a good thing in a comptative system. Nvidia doesnt need to open their drivers just port them. Last time I checked Creative didnt have open drivers for the SoundBlaster cards but they run just fine on Linux (I have not checked for BSD support and dont really plan on doing it). That is an example of a company with a great product that is cross platform compatible. Open drivers are nice but ultimatly not that important. It's the existance of drivers that is the issue.

Re:If you like it

[Callamon]

I bought the GF4 Ti4600 from evga.com during the pre-order phase (and am very happy with it). The cool thing is evga's upgrade program.. Within 2 years I can trade it in for the latest/greatest card, and have the full amount I bought it for applied to the new card. :)

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

hi,

I went to evga.com looking for the upgrade program you mentioned, but couldn't find it. Was it a special promotional deal?

Re:If you like it

[oddo]

creative has free software drivers for gnu/linux. and as far as I know there are some sort of specs that would make it easy to port to another platform.

Re:If you like it

[scott1853]

Is there really anybody here that hasn't bought one? Personally I buy their cards because they're the best. I really don't see the need to make the purchase of a certain video card to make a political statement. If you want to support open source donate toward blender, or sign up for an account with the makers of your favorite linux distro.

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

The Creative people don't need to provide open-source drivers, because you can get them from other developers (OSS, ALSA...). With this approach, you'll still be able to use your hardware with any O/S you choose, long after Creative has lost any interest in supporting it.
You have no certainty about that with closed-source drivers. What if Nvidia suddenly decides that it's just not worth it to port their drivers to XFree86 5.0 (whenever it comes out)?

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but Creative products are not worth having.

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

> What if Nvidia suddenly decides that it's just not worth it to port their drivers to XFree86 5.0 (whenever it comes out)?

You'll have to fall back on the XFree86 5.0 "nv" driver, just as you needed to use the nv driver before NVidia released their enhanced one. Yes, this means that fullscreen DVD playback won't happen, and graphic-intensive games will suck, but the baseline 2D functionality will work fine.

Re:If you like it

[Freedom Bug]

Saying "nVidia is the best" got a lot harder on July 18. Their new 9000 is much nicer than nVidia's crippled 4MX series, and the 9700 is 6 months ahead of nVidia. Which is amazing, because nVidia used to be consistently 6 months ahead of ATI.

Of course, ATI is missing a strong competitor to the 4Ti that the original poster referred to.

Bryan

Re:If you like it

[smagoun]

Is there really anybody here that hasn't bought one? Personally I buy their cards because they're the best.

me

but then again, what do I know.

NVidia's cards might be the best, if you define "best" as "most FPS in Quake". They're not "best" if you care about things like accurate color, stable drivers (several of my cow-orkers have shiny new laptops with NVidia chipsets/drivers that bring the things down every hour or two), etc. ATI still has them beat there, as do other manufacturers.

And yes, money talks. If people like something but nobody buys it, that something is usually considered a failure. In this case, sending a friendly thank-you note to NVidia along with your order is probably a good course of action...

Re:If you like it

[be-fan]

Theoretically, you don't need source to port to BSD. The kernel driver has an abstraction layer (which comes in source form) and is fully portable. The XFree86 module (by design of the XFree86 driver model) is platform independent and can be loaded on any x86 OS. As it stands, it is not in NVIDIA's best interest to release the driver code. First, parts of it are copyrighted by other parties. Second, you can bet that ATI and Matrox would love to get their hands on it. Remember, an OpenGL ICD is an entire OpenGL implementation, not just a hardware banger. That makes the situation rather unique. ATI has some hardware that could be seriously compatitive with NVIDIA's if it had proper drivers. Why should NVIDIA jepordize their company to placate 0.01% of its users?

Re:If you like it

[be-fan]

Huh? ATI is famous for crappy drivers, both in Windows and in X. As for me, I've never had any problem's with NVIDIA's drivers (Windows 95 -> Linux 2.5*), and I've only used NVIDIA cards in all my machines since my PII-300.

Re:If you like it

[EvlG]

stable drivers...ATI still has them beat there

You have got to be kidding. nVIDIA is known for having rock solid drivers - I've never had a crash while running them, and most other people I know haven't either.

ATI is known for its poor drivers, and has been for a long time.

Re:If you like it

[cheese_wallet]

It's great to see some real competition in the video card market again, but in all fairness I don't think it is accurate to say ATI is 6 months ahead here. I haven't seen any 9700s on the shelves.

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

not in my world.

ATI's drivers might be *slower* than NVidia's, but I've never seen an ATI driver take out a machine quite the way I've seen NVidia do it.

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of us don't care if nVidia's own X drivers are ever open-sourced, but they could stop being so downright third-party-driver unfriendly. If they'd release programming details on the cards there could be decent drivers for them in XFree86 like there are for ATI.

Until then, it's ATI for me.

Re:If you like it

[smagoun]

Well, I guess we've each different experiences then. Of the several dozen gfx cards I've come in contact with over the years, only the NVidia cards have given me any shit. ATI's drivers have been butt-slow, but they worked.

Re:If you like it

[Callamon]

It was a special offer as part of the pre-order promotion. I'm not sure if you can still get it or not, but here are the details. There was a link from nvidia to the pre-order page before they rolled them out.

When a new card comes out, check nvidia's website and see if they have a link to it if it's another pre-order type of thing...

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

ATI is known for its poor drivers, and has been for a long time.

poor in that they're slow? or poor in that they crash and fux0r your machine? cuz that's what my gf3 driver did to my athlon

Re:If you like it

[HeUnique]

Then they'll loose shitload of money...

Remember - more and more special effects companies are moving to Linux. Not only in the rendering farm, but also at the artists workstations etc...

The 2D driver won't help much to the artists, and NVidia do want those studios to buy the latest and greatest graphics cards from them - specially the Quadro line which is their top professional card (and costs less then half of the really professional OpenGL based cards) - without drivers, those studios won't buy it. Thats why you see NVidia, Matrox and ATI promising drivers for Linux - and delivering them (specially NVidia - which keeps updating their driver).

Re:If you like it

[Surt]

I think you're going to find your experience in the minority. ATI's driver reputation is really, really bad compared to nvidia.

Re:If you like it

[HeUnique]

Don't know about you - but I had until few months ago few problems with NVidia cards + VIA chipset and AMD Athlon. Those problems have dissapeared lately.

As for ATI - well, their X driver is very good (written by non ATI people), but their Windows NT 4 drivers really sucks!

Re:If you like it

[Callamon]

From what I've seen, I thought the 9700 series wasn't going to be available for several months, and that by then or soon after, nvidia should have their next-gen card out (if they can overcome the .13micron fabrication problem).

In any case, saying that ATI blows nVidia's GF4 away with the 9700 series card (when it's not even out yet) is like comparing a Pentium 4 3GHz processor to an AMD Athlon 2200 even though the 3GHz version isn't out yet...

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

http://opensource.creative.com/

Creative did open source their drivers. They were even supporting them for a while, but then magically, a lot of effort stopped. But the drivers keep improving, thanks to the help from Creative (a company whom I dispise, but respect for doing this).

Re:If you like it

[13Echo]

PowerVR writes great drivers for the Kyro 2 chips. The K2 boards also have beautiful internal 32 bit true color rendering, and the 2D graphics look incredible too. They also have good Linux drivers, but are currently in a beta state.

I totally reccommend them to other Linux users if you just want high-GeForce 2 level performance (they are almost 2 years old now.). But they are great for games like RTC Wolfenstein. Very stable too, as they were in Windows 2000.

Re:If you like it

[hummer357]

well, actually this thing nvidia's doing is called 'promotion'.

opensourcing the Cg stuff is a great way to get lots of people using it, and it gets into the press well, since OSS is all the rave right now.

still, it's a nice thing...

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a veritable river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

Re:If you like it

[iomud]

Not only are nvidia drivers stable, but they squeeze every last drop of performance they can out of their cards on a consistant basis. ATI's drivers dont realize 100% of the potential performance of the hardware, why would I buy such a beast of a card if it effectively has a governor on it.

Re:If you like it

[neroz]

Closed source is not evil, no. But in the case of these Nvidia drivers for *BSD, it's not exactly Angelic. The problem is that the people in Nvidia just aren't too interested in BSD, so they don't put resources behind the driver. Sadly, they can't just let the code go and be done with it, they have to maintain the thing just like the windows and linux drivers.

Anyway, they do have working drivers, which were done by 2-3 people who run FreeBSD there. But other than them, noone else there is interested, so the drivers are not likely to be released (2-3 people can't maintain the thing on their own while staying in sync with the other two drivers). Also, the two initiatives by non-nvidia people to get a working driver for FreeBSD seem to have died, one officially, the other just seems to have gradually slowed to a halt. :-/

Now if the drivers had been open, *BSD would have working drivers, and all NVidia would have to do is look after the Windows driver. My next card will be a Radeon, since the only reason I run Linux is because of the lack of nvidia drivers for BSD :-(

By the way, before anyone starts telling me I'm making things up, they really DO have working drivers, I found this out from an nvidia employee on OPN who joined #FreeBSD.

Re:If you like it

[cHiphead]

i think the BSD comment on the story was meant to ask if its a BSD License...

Re:If you like it

[qubit64]

yup. ive bought only ati and matrox myself. (i only really started caring about which card i had about a year ago and i then waited a few months and got an 8500. it's been pretty good, although the linux drivers took forever to come out, and i still dont have a really good 3d driver.

Re:If you like it

[vandan]

Unfortunately I have had the same experience.
My NVidia cards (TNT and TNT2) used to crash ALL THE TIME under xfree86 (3.3.x and 4.x.x) so I finally thought "Enough of this shit" and bought myself a Radeon, and I haven't looked back since. The drivers are very fast (I used to play Quake 3 and Tribes 2 fine on my Athlon 500 (now I have Athlon 1600XP) and it's nice to watch the DRI drivers mature and get faster & more feature complete.

Re:If you like it

[JewFish]

They make cards now? I thought they just made kick ass chipsets, belive if they made a card I would purchase it.

Re:If you like it

[jandrese]

Well, the problem is the ball is mostly in the NVidias court WRT FreeBSD drivers. Supposedly the Linux drivers should be very similar to the FreeBSD drivers, but so far nothing has come out of NVidia.

Re:If you like it

[Ogerman]

Money talks. If you like what they are doing, tell them you like it by buying one of their cards.

But first you'd better understand what they're doing and what they're not. They are NOT open-sourcing their video card drivers. Until they do or somebody manages to reverse engineer the binary ones, their products remain proprietary. IMHO, nobody that supports Free Software should buy proprietary hardware that requires closed-source drivers. So it seems instead this Cg thing is just a language for programming shaders so you don't have to use assembly. Big deal. It's a step in the right direction to have a standard, but it doesn't make their products any more friendly to Free Software.

Re:If you like it

[Afrosheen]

Render farms don't even need video cards from any company to render from raw data. All you need is a cluster of headless, keyboardless clones and you're in business.

Now the people doing the modeling..well they're probably not using linux anyway. Most likely they've got a nice high-end SGI box in front of them.

This just really isn't very important right now.

Re:If you like it

[Afrosheen]

I'll second that. I bought an NVIDIA tnt2 ultra 32mb card a few years ago. During the time I had it, I saw about 4 revisions of drivers, with each revision the 3d output got more full-featured and faster. The very last driver release (while I was using it, upgraded last year) nearly doubled the framerate it was getting.

I can only pray that they're able to squeeze performance like that out of my geforce4 ti4200 in the future. I can already overclock the hell out of it but it's just not wise :)

Re:If you like it

[kuiken]

shame they have no hw T&L

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft confirms that *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sold another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Then why you buy that crap?

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but you fail to understand that nobody who just wants fast video gives a fuck about Free Software. There IS a difference between wanting to be a smelly hippy living by a strange and illogical ideology and wanting better 3D performance.
It seems instead this Cg thing is Nvidia's way of saying "improve our language for free, thanks dickheads!" while at thhe same time saying "give away our trade secrets? Fuck you!". And if you're a shareholder you'll agree that this is exactly what they should be saying.

Re:If you like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you wouldn't know by the way that it compares to a GeForce 2 in the new Unreal game now, would you? Some of us would say that the GeForce cards are pretty pathetic in comparison... *with* hardware T+L.

Re:If you like it

[EvlG]

Ever uninstalled ATI drivers?

Up until very recently, it would completely destroy your machine.

Re:If you like it

[Freedom Bug]

They claim August, which isn't that far away. They aren't a software company, so they might make the date, but I'd need good odds to lay money on it...

You're right, the comparisons are similar. Lots of people have 3GHz p4's: either early samples or overclocks, but the average Joe doesn't.

Bryan

Could someone explain what's this?

[Xouba]

I've read the article, but I believe I'm not enough of a graphics geek to understand it O:-) What's a "Cg compiler"? What's it for?

Re:Could someone explain what's this?

[sdjunky]

What's a "Cg compiler"

Cg compiler stands for "C for Graphics"

People who write pixel shaders ( those nice little algorithms that makes games pretty ) for things like fog effects, lighting etc have to use some low level assembly ( which is sometimes tied to the card as well ). This will allow for a higher level language so you can use do loops, for next etc. with writing shaders and for possible expanded ( cross card ) support

Re:Could someone explain what's this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Cg" is a C-like language Nvidia is creating (I believe they were collaborating with Microsoft on it?) that is specificly designed with graphics in mind.

I don't know much about it myself.

Re:Could someone explain what's this?

[mark-t]

I've read the article, but I believe I'm not enough of a graphics geek to understand it

Then what're reading Slashdot for? ;)

I'm not sure if it will help, but you can read more about Cg Here.

Re:Could someone explain what's this?

[beamdriver]

Then what're reading Slashdot for? ;)

The many flavors of Geek, large and small. As long as someone believes in their heart that they are a Geek, then they're welcome here.

Geek to live. Live to Geek

Well, one thing's for sure

[Anonymous Coward]

a nonrestrictive, free license

We know it won't be under the GPL. Any license that restricts what I can do with code isn't Free by any means.

Free code?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell me more.....

-sincerely,
Trident Technologies

ATI is Dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

this just in, ATI is dead!

Re:ATI is Dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, or this could be a knee jerk reaction to the first major challenge to Nvidia's graphics card dominance in several years. All of a sudden they're getting their arse whiped in benchmarks and there's little hope of recovery for several months. So they better do SOMETHING to get some positive press...

Yay!!! More lunix!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

yay!!

OpenGL 2.0 shader

[johnjones]

so are they looking to get this into OpenGL 2.0 ?

there was some debate on which was better 3DLabs or this as well as an ATI solution

anyone know more ?

but whatever happens Thank you
after all the chip business needs a reason to sell more chips and graphics is a big one the faster people can use the new features the more games/apps need powerfull chips

regards

john jones

Re:OpenGL 2.0 shader

[Jucius Maximus]

"so are they looking to get this into OpenGL 2.0 ?"

Maybe this is a move to help stem off the patent problems with MSFT related to OpenGL and provide an alternative system.

Perhaps what I just said doesn't mean anything and I am confusing different things - is Cg an alternative to OpenGL or something else? I do not know enough about graphics to tell.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 shader

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Go and have a look at the OpenGL.org website - theres a poll on the left hand side asking what shading language to plop into OpenGL2.0.

Doesn't mean it will happen, but it looks like maybe the ARB are considering all options at the moment.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 shader

[domninus.DDR]

This was detailed in an article several weeks ago. Cg will compile for both OpenGL and DirectX, but people were worried because nvidia has had such close relationships with microsoft that they would phase out OpenGL support or something of the like. Personally, I wouldnt worry about nvidia doing something like that.

Re:OpenGL 2.0 shader

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia has proposed Cg to the OpenGL ARB to become a standard. It takes quite a while for something to become officially part of the GL spec, so don't expect an announcement anytime soon about an official GL shading language.

3D Labs of course also has their own shading language, which is tentatively called the GL 2 Shading Language proposal. It has also been presented to the GL ARB for consideration.

However, GL 1.4 spec was just announced. They are likely working on GL 1.5. I doubt there will be a jump to GL 2.0 anytime soon.

license

[bsDaemon]

ass the article fails to spell out the details, other than it is a "non-restrictive open source lisence" we can assume this means something like the BSD or X lisences, especially since MS co developed it. The was a daemonnews thread a while back about Bill Gates saying how governments should use BSD-style lisences for the absolue maximum effectevness on stuff they develope. It just allows more embracing and extending to happen.

Re:license

[Anonymous Coward]

They are right, BSD license should be used by anything payed by tax money. Why?
Because companies pay massive taxes on pretty much everything, and it is only fair if they are able to use the sourcecode in their products too.

No GPL/LGPL thank you.

Re:license

[schon]

we can assume this means something like the BSD or X lisences, especially since MS co developed it

If MS helped develop it, no way will it be BSD.

Bill Gates saying how governments should use BSD-style lisences

Well DUH! Can't this be translated as "World's greediest person says 'other people should give me stuff!'"?

Gates thinks that other organizations should release stuff under the BSD license, so that MS can profit from it... you'll note that he's never said Microsoft should use the BSD license.

I'd think that it'll probably be something more like the MPL or Apple's version (ie. if you release changes, you have to give nVidia license to bundle and sell it.)

Re:license

[kirkjobsluder]

>>The was a daemonnews thread a while back about Bill Gates saying how governments should use BSD-style lisences for the absolue maximum effectevness on stuff they develope. It just allows more embracing and extending to happen.

I was always under the impression that at least with the U.S. government works automatically fell into the public domain. (Which I see as a possible conflict with the GPL since it does not permit the relase of works under public domain.)

Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been coding in Cg for some time, there have been a number of problems I've faced so far:

1. The vertex engine calls are not logical. Sometimes you call passing a referenced pointer, other time you have to pass a referenced strucute, some form of standarization to calls would have made it easier for developers to write function calls (more insane than POSIX threads).

2. The lanugae is not truely Turning complete. Which could have been fixed by taking some more time and making the language more complete.

3. The compiled bytecode is giving a security mask that disables it's use on chips that do not carry a compliment decoder (To keep competetors away?).

4. Confusing definitions of pointer/references. They could have made this easier by removing the entire pointer usage.

5. Class calls outside of friend functions can at certain times reach memory outside of parent definitions (Bad language design?! I think this is one of the most debated feature/bug, since you can piggyback this to implement vertex calls within lighmaps).

6. No SMP support in current implmentation and no thoughts to future support (What about threading?!).

7. Inlining support is bad and possibly unusable outside the scope of inling cg within c.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

Class calls outside of friend functions can at certain times reach memory outside of parent definitions (Bad language design?! I think this is one of the most debated feature/bug, since you can piggyback this to implement vertex calls within lighmaps).


Agree, What I feel is that this is bad design, not a bug nor is it a feature. I have been testing on Nvidia's TestA hardware interface with cg and that has been the most annoying uptodate (along with the pointer disaster).

Cg should not have been done the way it was done. I for one would have welcomed them embracing an established language instead of creating one buggy one like this.

There was thought given into using Lisp intitally, but I guess the powers that be decided it should have to create a new and totally confusing language.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[_bug_]

Well if it's unrestrictive open source, it should be possible to write or reorganize the Cg language structure to something more complete. As long as it compiles compatible byte code... right?

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

But why should anyone do this? To hell Nvidia Corp sell their hardware? I fail to see any reason why we should support such a project when we have better things we can do (OpenGL et el).

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

s/hell/help/

But hell looked good too. =)

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Zathrus]

There was thought given into using Lisp intitally, but I guess the powers that be decided it should have to create a new and totally confusing language

Well, better a new and totally confusing one than an old and totally confusing one.

Yes, I've coded lisp before. But I recovered.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

As an example of what the author ment above, see the following Cg code where I define an out of v2f and fill it with vertex noise.

As you can see from this code the languge defintions are so loose that construction of highly illegal functions might be possible.

Why didnt microsoft just use C# with cg instead? Or as said earlier Lisp? This is bad design and might be the reason why Nivida has given up on M$ and came at the feet of the opensource ppl. I hope we don't help them.

{
v2f OUT;

float4 noisePos = mul(NoiseMatrix, IN.Position);

float i = (noise(noisePos.xyz, pg) + 1.0f) * 0.5f;
OUT.Color0 = float4(i, i, i, 1.0f);
OUT.vertexNoise = Delnoise.MSFT(Noise.viretx, &i);
// displacement along normal
float4 position = IN.Position + (IN.Normal * i * Displacement);
position.w = 1.0f;

// Call vertex out using imgmap
OUT.ImageMap = friend(v2f);
OUT.Masking = 0x5442;
OUT.OSflags = MS && _DELNEGATOR_ && _MAPOUTSIDE_;
OUT.HPosition = mul(ModelViewProj, position);

return OUT;
}

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[ToLu the Happy Furby]

2. The lanugae is not truely Turning complete. Which could have been fixed by taking some more time and making the language more complete.

This was done on purpose. Current (and next-generation) GPU shader hardware is not Turing complete, so it'd be quite silly for Cg to be. The problem is that while most extensions to Cg can be added with a vendor-specific profile, extensions which would make the language more general purpose (like pointers, full flow control, etc.) are apparently considered changes to the language design and only NVidia can add them. This isn't a problem now, but it would be if another vendor came out with a more general purpose shader implementation first. (Technically it may be possible to make Cg Turing complete through the extensions NVidia has made available, but probably not in a very friendly way.)

3. The compiled bytecode is giving a security mask that disables it's use on chips that do not carry a compliment decoder (To keep competetors away?).

Well, supposedly anyone can write a compiler/interpreter for Cg bytecode to target and optimize for their hardware just like NVidia can. (Of course they would need to introduce new functionality to the language through extensions, but the point is any standard Cg bytecode should execute on any DX8+ GPU with a compiler.) Indeed, this is one of (perhaps the only) huge plus to Cg: because it can be interpreted at runtime, rather than just compiled to shader assembly at compile time, new GPUs can (assuming they have an optimizing compiler) optimize existing shader code. This will be nice, for example, in allowing the same shader bytecode to run optimized on DX8 parts (few shader instructions allowed per pass), upcoming DX9 parts (many but not unlimited instructions per pass), and probably future parts with unlimited program length shaders.

Yes, it does require the other vendors to write their own backend for Cg, but NVidia has supposedly released enough for them to do that with no disadvantages. The question is whether they will want to, given that doing so would support a language that NVidia retains control over (as opposed to MS-controlled DX and by-committee OpenGL).

6. No SMP support in current implmentation and no thoughts to future support (What about threading?!).

Presumably this can be done via an extension, although it might get ugly to retain backwards compatability.

7. Inlining support is bad and possibly unusable outside the scope of inling cg within c.

What about inlining shader assembly in Cg? And beyond that, what sort of inlining would you want?

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[gwernol]

2. The lanugae is not truely Turning complete. Which could have been fixed by taking some more time and making the language more complete.

On what basis do you make this claim? Turing (note spelling) completeness can be achieved in very simple languages (for example: Iota) and judging by the Cg language spec. I can't see any reason to doubt that Cg is.

Was there something specific you were thinking of?

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

Since GPU Shader is not Turing complete, the language need not be, I thought it was very logical. No further explanation is needed, please read other posts elsewhere before commenting, and you should also read that Cg language spec you have linked to without Karma trolling.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

Mark,

It's no point posting on /. as an AC, we know you cause these are the points you always highlight. I know you were against the language redesign and I know you were one of the few who wanted Lisp in there, but the decision has been made and Microsoft has helped us create a good language that we can extend (helpfully with the help of the community out here).

Now, please get back to work :)

The guy sitting behind you with a real desk :P

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

Both of you get back to work.

The guy sitting behind you with a real office and a real desk.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

I have trouble following what you are saying. First of all, there are no pointers in Cg. Input variables have the qualifier "in" (this qualifier can be omitted), and output variables have the qualifier "out". All parameters are passed by value. There are no pointers, and there are no references in the style of C++.

While there are no pointers explicitly in the language, you can effectively get pointer dereferencing by doing a dependent texture lookup. This is a common technique today with DX8 (e.g. reflective bump mapping) but so far it isn't commonly discussed as a "pointer dereference" or "indirection".

Also, in your comment you seem to be confusing the Cg shading language and the Cg runtime environement API, which are two quite-different things.

Eric

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[nihilogos]

I am pretty sure the above post is just rubbish someone made up to make a couple of moderators look stupid.

AFAIK Cg is a C like language designed to make writing vertex and pixel shaders easier. Real time shaders for nvidia's and ati's are currently done in assembly. It is not supposed to be a new language like C or Python or insert-language-here. All it has to do are transforms on 3d vertex or pixel information.

A vertex shader takes as input position, normal, colour, lighting and other relevent information for a single vertex. It performs calculations with access to some constant and temporary registers, then outputs a single vertex (this is what the chip is built for). It does this for every vertex in the object being shaded. Pixel shaders are a little more complex but similar.

Points 1-7 have nothing to do with Cg.

There is a very good article on vertex and pixel shaders here

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but it's pretty clear you don't know much :P

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[gwernol]

Since GPU Shader is not Turing complete, the language need not be, I thought it was very logical. No further explanation is needed,

Sorry but you are wrong. Simply restating your opinion does not constitute a rebuttal.

The Cg language is - as far as I can tell from reading the spec. - fully Turing compatible. Is it possible you don't know what Turing compatible is?

To be Turing compatible a language needs to support branching and looping. Okay its not quite that simple but this is the essential bit. Cg has both the if and the for () statements.

At best you could argue that some of the profiles currently supported, like dx8vs, don't support conditional branching. However even in this case the ?: operator is supported which means that this profile of the language (probably) is Turing complete.

Even if you disagree that the dx8vs profile is Turing complete, the Cg language defintely is because it does support the if conditional branch.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

I am pretty sure the above post is just rubbish someone made up to make a couple of moderators look stupid.

As if the moderators needed any help looking stupid.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK you are simply trolling. The orginal parent poster is a Nivida employee, maybe he knows somethings you and I don't know?

I'm pretty sure your post is what's the rubbish post, made to make moderators think they were foolish when they were not, and instead mod you up. For one, Mark posted without being logged in why would he care about moderation? You on other hand is Karma trolling.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't I tell you, it's Wednesday you have to spread FUD? Tuesday is for coding security into our applications, please make sure you keep this in mind as my Memo dated May 24 2002 mentioned.

William Gates (Part 3)

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

If all that was something to make moderators look stupid, why are so many intelligent people replying very sensible replies?

When I look at a post, I imeeditaly look at the S/N level, the parent has the least on this article, thus it's evident this is not someoen trolling.

Next, I see if the person is logged in or not (Like you, wanting karma).

I've done some Cg coding (being registered as a Nvidia developer), and all he said is pretty down to what Cg is, it's not a general purpose language and thus not Turing complete.

All points have to do with Cg. If not why didn't you come up with counter points telling us why not? Have you even got the developer bundle or even dished out enough money to buy it?

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[MicroBerto]

It's time to get the telecom and security group over there to block these "time-wasting" sites from the coder's machines!

The guy who owns NVidia stock (and owns you!)

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

The language is not truely Turning complete. Which could have been fixed by taking some more time and making the language more complete.

Once you make a language turing complete, it then inherits the "halting problem" issue. I.e., you could hang your video card in the pixel shader, with no way of knowing how or why. I don't think nVidia is interested in introducing a new "blue screen of death" scenario, or creating an on the fly pixel shader debugging environment. Its just a graphics card, not an operating system.

Re:Nvidia's Cg

[Anonymous Coward]

You too are mistaken. You have assumed that someone considers you worth arguing with.

If gcc is the GNU c compiler

[SpanishInquisition]

this one should be called gcgc

or gc^2 or gc**2 or pow(gc,2)

Re:If gcc is the GNU c compiler

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking moron.

Re:If gcc is the GNU c compiler

[BlackGriffen]

sorry, gcc = gnu compiler collection.

BGriff

just how free?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder just how "nonrestrictive" it is.

C'Mon DFSG-free... [crossing fingers]

Re:just how free?

[QueefChief]

So, fucking google it or ask someone. No one gives a shit about what you wonder.

Nvidia's GLIDE

[papasui]

I can't help but think back to 3DfX and the glide library and think that this may be Nvidia's goal, it probably would be a great way for Nvidia optomized code to be developed if the compiler automatically did some special things for Nvidia cards even if it did output a product that works on almost all video cards (OpenGL).

Re:Nvidia's GLIDE

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Cg is open source, ATI can take it, rewrite it slightly so that it automatically creates code for their specialized functions as well as Nvidia's.

As free as the nVidia graphics card Linux modules?

[C.U.T.M.]

Will only a 'portion' of this compiler be free? Some of you may or may not know that their Linux modules require a proprietary 'binary stub'. Thus the difficulty in porting any of their stuff to other UNIXs such as FreeBSD.

Hopefully that won't be the case with this.

What a great news

[Cardhore]

What a great announcement. It's really great to see all these great organizations coming to their senses. It really shows just how much unity and togetherness we share in the free software community. It really, truly is an excellent and remarkable time to be alive, and to be into the free software and open-source scene we all love. I'm sure the forefathers of free software, like ESR, Linus Torvalds, and Richard Stallman would have wished that they could have been alive and around today had they known about how awesome the scene just is this very day. I'm sure they would have given anything to witness these wonderful times. I, for one, am certainly looking forward to downloading a few of these incredible wares; they certainly look great based on my own research and the opinions of others, whom I really and truly respect, deeply. I hope that you, too, my friend, can scrounge up enough change, enough dough (times are tough), and purchase you and your best buddies some prime bandwidth to this going-to-be spectacular and amazing software servers. In fact, even if you don't have money, I really hope that you can borrow some, or just use someone else's net connection. Even if you plan on reselling the wares commercially, I am still happy just as long as someone buys your wares, as that would make that single person all the more happier to be using this wonderful and great software to be put on by these terriffic organizations. News like this just shows what a great time it really is for us all to be alive and well, and how these great organizations are breathing new life into and shattering our preconceptions about software in general. Hats of, my friends, and enjoy yourselves out there. Take care now, and whatever you don't don't miss out on this golden software opportuninty, this pot-of-gold at the end of the open-source rainbow, this 20 carat diamond hidden 20,000 leagues under the ocean of proprietary software, or you will regret it. Even in death, my friend, amigos, chumps, and buddies.

Re:What a great news

[zmalone]

You are a fool. Not only are you seemingly unable to produce readable text, but it barely makes sense. "I'm sure the forefathers of free software, like ESR, Linus Torvalds, and Richard Stallman would have wished that they could have been alive and around today"?

Re:What a great news

[Mr Thinly Sliced]

Man I read that and fell in love. Lets elope together. I'll bring the lube, you bring the hamster.

Meet outside of school behind the bike shed I've got some smokes and then we can go throw rocks at cars.

Cooperation

[SpelledBackwards]

Some of the best news is that they've openly said they'll include support for ATI and other large manufacturers of competing graphics products. I'm glad to see that Nvidia isn't being closed-minded or trying to undermine their own intentions for ease of development by using the proprietarity card.

Cg for Macs NOW!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.petitiononline.com/MUAMW/petition.html

Does this really address the matter of concern?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm in a field totally different from graphics programming and hardware, but:

In my reading of earlier coverage of Cg, my understanding that most people weren't concerned about Cg or its compiler being open source, but rather that Cg would depend to some extent on hardware specs that are proprietary. This would have the effect of driving other hardware competitors out of business because they can't implement Cg components because of hardware patents. Sort of similar to fears associated with MS open sourcing part of C# while keeping a good deal of it dependent on proprietary stuff. The fear is that Cg would lead to people saying things like "well, your video card is so crappy it doesn't even support a standard graphics programming language" (all the while being unaware that the card can't because of hardware patents). Just because the language and compiler is open-source doesn't mean the hardware it will run on is.

Anyone more knowledgable care to comment? Am I misunderstanding this?

About the license

[Anonymous Coward]

Please read here:
http://www.cgshaders.org/contest/
As you can see from the terms and conditions on that CG site, they favour and link to the ZLib license.

I think that CG will be under the PHP/ZLib license.

erm... yeah

[lingqi]

The lanugae is not truely Turning complete. Which could have been fixed by taking some more time and making the language more complete.

i would really love to give some witty comments here -- but am at a loss of words. which could be fixed by thinking up a few words to form a witty comment with.

Re:erm... yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to start by suggesting that the original poster's English language skills weren't truly complete, but it was too much effort to cut and paste up the original text into a response.

Lazy am I. Now Jar-Jar dies.

here's the text, in case of a /. effect!!

[Anonymous Coward]

NVIDIA Open Sources Cg Compiler Technology

For further information, contact:

Susan Austin
NVIDIA Corporation
(408) 486-7336
saustin@nvidia.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

SIGGRAPH 2002 -- SAN ANTONIO, TX -- JULY 23, 2002 -- NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced that it is open sourcing the NVIDIA Cg Compiler technology under a nonrestrictive, free license. Available in August for download from the developer.nvidia.com and www.cgshaders.org Web sites, this code will contain the parser that reads the language and creates intermediate code for compilation, as well as a generic back-end. Together, these components provide everything required to create optimized Cg compilers for other platforms and architectures. In addition to the NVIDIA Cg Compiler, NVIDIA has provided full source code for example shaders in the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit.

"We've experienced enormous interest in Cg since its introduction," said Dan Vivoli, vice president of marketing at NVIDIA. "We're open sourcing this compiler code to further accelerate the transition to an era of advanced real-time effects through Cg."

"Petty licensing disputes have marred many attempts at industry wide cooperation," said John Carmack, co-founder, owner and lead programmer of id Software, Inc. "NVIDIA's decision to open source some of their development work with a very liberal license is a positive step that I hope other vendors will follow."

Emerging as the "C" for graphics, the Cg Language Specification provides developers a complete programming environment that is easy to use and allows for the fast creation of special effects and real-time cinematic quality experiences on multiple platforms. By providing a new level of abstraction, Cg removes the need for developers to program directly to the graphics hardware assembly language, and thereby more easily target OpenGL®, DirectX® 8.0 and DirectX 9.0. The industry-standard Cg Language was developed in close collaboration with Microsoft® Corporation and is compatible with Microsoft's recently announced High Level Shading Language for DirectX 9.0. Last month, NVIDIA announced the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit, comprised of the NVIDIA Cg Compiler 1.0, optimized for DirectX and OpenGL; the NVIDIA Cg Browser, a prototyping/visualization environment with a large library of Cg shaders; a CgFX file format; the Cg Standard Library; and a collection of pre-written Cg shaders which can be used for a variety of applications, ranging from game development to digital content creation and computer-aided design. The NVIDIA Cg Toolkit and other user documentation can be downloaded at http://developer.nvidia.com/cg.

About NVIDIA
NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq - NVDA), located in Santa Clara, CA, is the global leader in advanced graphics and multimedia processing technology for the consumer and professional computing markets. Its 2D, 3D, video and multimedia capabilities make NVIDIA one of the premier semiconductor companies in the world. NVIDIA offers a wide range of products and services, delivering superior performance and crisp visual quality for PC-based applications such as manufacturing, science, e-business, entertainment and education.

Certain statements in this press release, including the statements relating to the Company's performance expectations for NVIDIA's family of products and expectations of continued revenue growth, are forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, manufacturing and other delays relating to new products, difficulties in the fabrication process and dependence of the Company on third-party manufacturers, general industry trends including cyclical trends in the PC and semiconductor industries, the impact of competitive products and pricing alternatives, market acceptance of the Company's new products, and the Company's dependence on third-party developers and publishers. Investors are advised to read the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, particularly those sections entitled "Certain Business Risks," for a fuller discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties.

# # #

Registered trademark NVIDIA® Corporation, 2002. All other company and/or product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective manufacturers. Features, pricing, availability, and specifications are subject to change without notice.

Note to editors: If you are interested in viewing additional information on NVIDIA, please visit the NVIDIA Press Room at http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=press_room.

Vector C

[Steveftoth]

Everyone is excited about this but the only thing is that it's really not that important because you still have to have a compiler. Until other graphics card manufacturers make Cg compilers this won't really be a standard and still an nVidia solution.

Besides there are already C compilers that will turn your normal C code in to vector code. For PS2 and 3D-Now/SSE instructions. Check out codeplay for more info. Yes you have to pay for it. They don't have a compiler for the DirectX shading machine yet but this proves that they could. It's not like we have to invent a new language for every machine.

Re:Vector C

[be-fan]

Wow. This is so off base its not even funny. This has nothing to do with vector code. Any given Cg program is highly non-vectorizible. They have a very limited number of inputs and only one output. Sure, multiple vertex units can run the same vertex program on different verticies (or pixel shaders can run same pixel program on different pixels) but a vectorizing compiler has nothing to do with it. Besides that fact, a C compiler is quite a leap away from a Cg compiler. We're talking about a machine that can't do loops properly...

Re:Vector C

[The Creator]

Until other graphics card manufacturers make Cg compilers this won't really be a standard and still an nVidia solution.

"source code", "non restritctive licence" and stuff like that means that oter gc makers don't have to make their own compilers.

Viability of CG

[Squalish]

This drammatically increases the chances that CG will become somewhat of a standard. Right now, it looks as if this is a case of NV putting forward the technology merely in order to push their products forward. Any standard without industry acceptance would be dead in the water, and its failure would invalidate the 3-dTbufferAnisographotopically mapped TexSurfaces features they would be including on their next cards. This way they have a way to get past the slow-as-hell OpenGL board and actually retain some control over the standards they work on without either ceding control to BillyG or keeping their competitors out. It works like this: NV knows it does not have the force to push its own Glide-esque language on the industry. There are too many other cards out there *cough*R300*cough* that could potentially grab enough market share to lure developers away from anything proprietory into existing standards that work on everything. Open-sourcing CG is also a way of putting pressure on other companies to adopt it, as ATI seems a little reluctant to adopt something that NV controls tightly. In the war between OpenGL2.0 and DirectX9.0, CG looked like it didn't have a chance to replace these venerable industry standards, but with a lot of developer support before either of these is released(by giving any potential CG programmer the source code for free) will validate it. It's explained pretty well in this article about the impending split in developer's plans.

Re:Viability of CG

[Squalish]

Why the !#$@ can't I just get simple pagebreaks.

Re:Sad Day

[Anonymous Coward]

STFU , who gives a rat's ass about that?

We're talking about trolls, not israeli's.

oh wait. Maybe we are talking about the same thing. lol.

happy troll tuesday.

ATI RenderMonkey

[Wolfier]

Practically, Cg is less useful than RenderMonkey because it is readily integrated into popular graphics packages.

However, there are some pretty good potential there, to make a Cg plugin for everything under the sun.

Controlling the Shader Language standard is almost as important as making a better video card, as you'll have a feature set your competitors have to follow - if Cg becomes the most popular language, then NVidia can say on their marketing material "GeForce 10: 100% Cg compatible, Radeon 50000: only supports 80%".

Re:ATI RenderMonkey

[TBone]

Practically, ATI should just get out of the graphics market. Or at the very least, stop trying to push standards, and write decent drivers.

The big deal isn't that the language is the end-all-be-all of graphics implementation languages, but that it's from a company with a history of being OpenSource-friendly, that has provided (albeit in binary not code form) drivers to OPen Source OS's, and has some of the best home graphics hardware out there.

So maybe it's not a perfect language. But it will be fixed, and we who run Open Source will buy more NVidia cards to support the effort.

Re:ATI RenderMonkey

[chris_oat]

Practically, ATI should just get out of the graphics market. Or at the very least, stop trying to push standards, and write decent drivers.

ATI's drivers are very good... when's the last time you gave an ATI product a try? I've been using a Radeon7500 and Radeon8500 and I never have any problems with the drivers. Also, what does "trying to push standards" mean? Isn't this what nVidia is doing with Cg?? How is ATI pushing standards?

but that it's from a company with a history of being OpenSource-friendly

And ATI is not open source friendly?? I'm running my Radeon8500 under linux with full 3d acceleration... sounds pretty friendly to me :)

No one....

[Anonymous Coward]

...Expects the spanish inquisition!

This is good marketing...

[eyepeepackets]

...and a great example of how to grow the market for a product by making a classic "Win-Win" situation for all players:

Nvidia gets lots of folks playing with their software/hardware all the while generating ever more interest in their products. Users of the product get new software toys for their hardware, making the creation of even more software toys easier.

*Cheer* Nvidia! I have one of the GeForce3 DDR cards and I love it (although giving up the old Voodoo3 was tough to do as it was a great card too.)

Perhaps some day soon other companies will realize the value of this type of marketing move and just do it! (Hey, that's catchy, "Just do it!" Makes me wanna hire third world mommies for pennies on the hour and work them like dogs.)

Patents?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's going to be open source, but will it be free of patents?

hey that is cool

[Hacker'sEdict]

Maybe ATI can actually maybe catch a glimps of it so that they will be able to make a good graphics card! And by the way good nvidia smart choice that will really make them more comsumer freindly.

Where are the e+'s

[DinZy]

You cannot waste an electron! Electrons can only be anhilated by collision with a positron or some other elementaty particle reaction.

Re:Where are the e+'s

[Omnifarious]

Now that was funny. :-)

Trollage

[Anonymous Coward]

Impressive amounts today...must be Tuesday.

isn't that the whole point?

[Anonymous Coward]

The lanugae is not truely Turning complete.
I thought the whole reason they made a new language (Cg) is because the chipsets weren't Turing complete. If they WERE Turing complete, then it would be a complete waste of time to make a new language -- just make a new back-end for your favourite C compiler and write a bit of run-time.

However, the chips themselves can't do very much -- they can't do a conditional branch, for example. This makes it quite difficult to make a C compiler target them :)

It would be very cool to just be able to do gcc -b nvidia-geforce9 ... or what have you since you'd be able to take advantage of a rich existing toolchain. But, alas, it's not to be.

This won't compile Mozlla?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I've been spending hours each day trying to get this crap to compile Mozilla. I wish someone would write a good FAQ or How-to on this. By the way I'm running Apache 2.0 on a web server I built out of Legos, and it rocks!

Hopefully it will be BSD

[essdodson]

I sure hope they go with BSD. GPL is more viral than that stuff I got from my last girlfriend. I sure hope they have the smarts to see through the hype and go with a truly free licensing scheme.

Seems like just another layer to keep coders out

[t0qer]

Nvidia, if you're reading this, please read.

For as long as I remember, the #1 complaint from the open source community has been the lack of open source X drivers, and the lack of documentation for directly accessing the hardware.

This still isn't direct access to the hardware is it? This is an API that goes through a compiler that translates things into machine code. Absolutely no real access to speak of.

Sometimes I wonder if nvidia cards are truly the hardware marvels that they are. Their implementation sort of reminds me of Play Incorporated's snappy video snapshot, where the hardware functions and bios get's loaded by an external program. I don't know if this is the exact case with nvidia hardware, but i'm pretty sure i'm not that far off the mark.

If that really is the case, it means that TNT2 cards are capable of all the neat tricks gforce cards only alot slower. I can see why you wouldn't want it opened up to the public. What's to stop a competetor from using the same hardware/software implementation you are?

I don't think it would seriously put a dent in the bottom line however. People tend to keep loyaltee's towards a company if it doesn't fuck their customers. Look at how many hits a day voodoofiles.com gets!

So be bold and daring like the new dorito's. Let other companies mimic your techniques, and try not to worry about the bottom line so much. If you let a bunch of open source guru's hack on your code, you could fire a few of those internal programmers thereby making up the cost. If you do this, anytime a relative, friend, customer asks us what 3d card solution they should get, we will respond NVIDIA.

yours truly

--toq

A question I'd like answered...

[jvmatthe]

The positive by NVIDIA so far is that they licensed technology from someone else to construct their drivers and hardware, and they are not at liberty to release open drivers. Fine, that's something I can accept for now.

What I'd really like to know is, as they move forward to new hardware and new drivers and new technologies, will they do so with the free software philosophy in mind, so that they can be more open about their work, and help the community adopt their hardware on other platforms than Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

Certainly, if they release this compiler under a free license, then that's a good first step, because it could mean that they recoginize the value of free software and how it aids the spread of technologies to new platforms, not to mention how good free interfaces can become standards. Seems clear that NVIDIA would like to be the new SGI, settings the standard by which graphic innovation is defined.

Re:A question I'd like answered...

[elvum]

Well, being a company with shareholders, they'll (continue to) do whatever they think will increase their revenues the most. Cg is one example, and if open-sourcing it guarantees it wide adoption, that's what they'll do. I doubt we'll see them open-sourcing their drivers until their quality and integration (one driver for all cards, etc) is no longer the significant competitive advantage that it is now.

good publicity for BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The BSD license predated the GPL and was a precursor of the whole free software movement. Before BSD, it was extremely rare to find freely available source code. You were lucky if you could get a binary, much less source code.

Amen to that.

[gatesh8r]

Even though they don't have GPL'ed drivers for Linux, they have full support. They give me the source code for the kernel driver so I can compile my own kernel and not be stuck to a stock kernel. Yeah, the licence doesn't allow redistribution, but I'm not exactly concerned about that since 1) They're giving the program to me for free as in beer, and 2) I'm not a developer so issues about code modification isn't my concern.

They have kick-ass products that officially support my platform of choice. 'Nuff said. :-)

Re:Amen to that.

[Pekka Lampila]

"2) I'm not a developer so issues about code modification isn't my concern."

I was born to rich family in rich country, so issues about growing hunger isn't my concern.

I'm going to die within next hundred years, so it's not my concern how badly we pollute our planet.

...

Re:Amen to that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Comparing source code access to issues of hunger and environmentalism shows your lack of maturity and/or your brainwashing by the Linux goof troop.

Re:Amen to that.

[Pekka Lampila]

Oh come on.

I was just trying to make a point. Not saying that source code access is as critical as access to clean food and water.

Many (most) people don't care much about software freedom, and I have nothing against them. They just disagree with me.

But it's strange if you don't care about free software just because _you_ wouldn't use the freedom's given to you.

I support freedom of speech, even if I don't say anything that government or anyone else would want to stop me from saying.

Re:Amen to that.

[smiff]

They give me the source code for the kernel driver

Does that source code include a one MB file called "Module-nvkernel"? Tell me, what language was that file written in?

They're giving the program to me for free as in beer

Presumably you shelled out a fair sum of cash to buy an Nvidia card. That card will not work without drivers. I can assure you, you paid for the drivers when you bought the card.

I'm not a developer so issues about code modification isn't my concern.

Even though you might never exercise your right to modify code, it should still be a concern for you. You wouldn't be running Linux if it weren't for the ability to modify code. Developer or not, the ability to modify (and audit) code benefits almost everyone (it's debatable whether or not it benefits Nvidia more than keeping the source closed).

What happens when someone restrains a freedom that you want to exercise? Should I support those restraints because they don't effect me? Even if the ability to modify code never benefits you, that doesn't mean you should disregard other people's freedoms.

For the record, if Nvidia were to open source their driver, developers could port it to other operating systems, such as FreeBSD and AtheOS. The X11 side of their driver could be ported to other graphic systems, such as Berlin or the graphics system for AtheOS. The kernel side could be integrated and distributed with the Linux kernel. The X11 side could be integrated and distributed with XFree86. Their code could be used in research projects for new graphics systems. It is possible that Nvidia's GPU can perform operations that could accelerate other computations (perhaps image recognition, speech recognition, or some other project which the drivers were never intended for). Since Nvidia won't open the source, we may never know.

Re:Amen to that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and the point is that your way of making a point was stupid.

Most people don't care about software freedom because they are sick of seeing people like yourself equate it with far more important issues. It's strange that you claim to support it, yet you undermine by making the usual lame statements.

Re:Amen to that.

[BiggyP]

i was under the impresion that they just gave you a binary module and sources to compile a loader against your current kernel version.

Re:Amen to that.

[Pekka Lampila]

I didn't mean to equate software freedom with anything, and you know that.

It wasn't the best way to make my point. But it ain't easy for me to present my thoughts, and doing it in foreign language doesn't help. So it wouldn't hurt if people were little less hostile, and tried to see what I really mean.

BTW. I would consider it lame to change one's mind about ethical values, because people who defend those values annoy you.

Re:Amen to that.

[antrik]

They do *not* have full support. There is no really working fbdev Driver for Nvidia; I guess the same is true for GGI. Because they neither have Open Source drivers, nor even release specs.

Moveover, the Nvidia driver used to crash the whole system, for a long time. That's the benefit of having propriatary shit in the Kernel. Thanks.

That's my reason not to buy Nvidia.

I wished there were more people caring about these things -- than maybe they'd realize they are doing wrong...

Re:Amen to that.

[scumdamn]

Quick! Compare him to Hitler!
I hate this kind of argument. Hunger!=Video drivers.

cf. Renderman/Maya compilation

[Freedom Bug]

ATI will be providing plug ins to compile Renderman or Maya code to run on its Radeon 9700 rather than on the central processor. Although not directly competing with Cg, this does seem to be a much better approach. Provided of course that you could take your 'binaries' from Renderman/Maya and use them in your video game or whatever.

Bryan

Last, desperate attempt to get it to use..

[Anonymous Coward]

Both OpenGL and d3d will have higher-level shader languages in the near future, and based on www.opengl.org voting, nvidia Cg isn't faring too well. So it seems that they're trying as hard as possible to get people to use their standard..

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[Quarters]

If that really is the case, it means that TNT2 cards are capable of all the neat tricks gforce cards only alot slower.

Well, duh. If that wasn't the case we'd not have had any computer graphics for the last few decades or so. If the hardware isn't doing it the CPU is. That's the whole *point* behind the GeForce line of cards.

Yes, you can do pixel and vertex shaders on the CPU, but it will make the application so slow as to be unusable.

Don't think that your 6 year old TNT2 card will become some magic speed demon if nVidia gives you driver source. It won't. Your argument is akin to saying, "Intel, give us the internals to the P4. I know I can make my 80286 run all new code if you do!"

well of course it's free

[SlugLord]

of course nvidia would make the compiler free, because they make hardware, not software. Think of the compiler as a "marketing vehicle." They make this really cool cg compiler, so everybody uses it to make some sweet graphics, and consumers need to buy new hardware to get 8 billion (or 40) frames per second.

CG Compiler is opensource, CG *IS NOT*

[Nite_Hawk]

It's important to make the distinction here. nVidia has opensourced the parser and compiler for CG, but they control the language. Look at it this way, nvidia needs something to show off NV30 with, and CG will be the thing to do it. This is in direct competition with the opengl 2.0 and DX9 HLSLs though, and you can bet that they won't be steering CG in any directions favorable to their competition like ATI or 3DLabs. It's fine if nVidia wants to do their own thing, but realize that this cg isn't nearly as open as the "opensource" headline makes it sound.

Since when...?

[ColGraff]

Since when do I need any sort of excuse - like encouraging Cg - to buy an Nvidia card? I needed an excuse?

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the lack of customer loyalty was what put 3Dfx out of business.

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[t0qer]

Don't think that your 6 year old TNT2 card will become some magic speed demon if nVidia gives you driver source.

Did I say that? I thought I said...
If that really is the case, it means that TNT2 cards are capable of all the neat tricks gforce cards only alot slower.

Please read comments before replying, thank you.

--toq

C for graphics?

[c_wraith]

C for graphics?

Does this mean I can segfault my video card now?

After all, it's not C if my first version of the code that compiles doesn't segfault immediately.

A Shader standard

[pajor]

Cg technology could be a great step forward. By releasing it under a nonrestrictive license, companys like splutterfish can accelerate their plans for a shading language in brazil.

The standardization on a shading language is going to push forward renderers two a new level, creating a massive pool of competition to Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman.

Re:As free as the nVidia graphics card Linux modul

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand it -- yes, only a portion of the compiler will be free, namely the front end. This is likely to be the trend with shading language compilers in the future, regardless of the what the languages itself is:

- An open source compiler front end, which scans and parses the language and performs semantic analysis. The output is probably the intermediate representation in the form of an abstract syntax tree. This is all standard compiler stuff.

- Vendor-specific, closed-source compiler back ends. The back ends are responsible for mapping the platform-independent intermediate representation to hardware-specific object code (e.g. NV_vertex_program or ATI_vertex_program). They'll be closed-source because the vendors often perform hardware-specific optimizations that take advantage of architecture design details. Since they never disclose architecture internals for competitive reasons, they won't release code for their compiler back end, either.

Eric

ATI Would Be Happy

[Anonymous Coward]

In Nvidia's defense(and as my own defense as a stockholder), open sourcing their drivers is one of the worst things they could do.Right now, all that keeps ATI below Nvidia is drivers; the Radeon 9700 has proven that ATI has the hardware to meet/beat Nvidia, but history says they lack the drivers. If ATI had access to Nvidia's driver source code, ATI could very well beat Nvidia, putting it in dire straights if it can't keep up with its hardware for even a short period of time(remember what happened to 3dfx when it lost its edge).

This isn't simply software here, drivers are as important as any silicon is(just ask Nvidia, they have more software engineers than hardware engineers). Open Source, while nice, would end their market advantage, and may very well end the competition in the graphics industry, since hardware is being "mandated" and standardized by Microsoft. Think of drivers as the service the "ideal: open source company would provide to make their money, not as something that can be easily tossed aside.

Re:ATI Would Be Happy

[HeUnique]

NVidia cannot release the source code due to parts which are not belong to them (they belong to SGI and other parties)...

BUT - do you really think that ATI or Matrox cannot reverse engineer the driver? Go ask Matrox engineer and they'll swear that NVidia reversed engineers Matrox's binary only driver for dual head and thats how NVidia got dual head (at least thats what one of Matrox engineers told me)

Re:ATI Would Be Happy

[dinivin]

NVidia cannot release the source code due to parts which are not belong to them (they belong to SGI and other parties)...

SGI has said, on a number of occaisions, that they are not at all involved in keeping the nVidia driver closed source. They have also stated that they are in favor of open sourcing the driver.

Dinivin

Re:ATI Would Be Happy

[Afrosheen]

Matrox engineers probably would claim that at this point. Basically dual head technology is old news and anyone can make a dual-headed card. This isn't nvidia's bread and butter and never was, so I doubt they took the time to reverse engineer Matrox's stuff.

It's a wonder Matrox is still alive in this day and age. Sure, they have what is considered the best 2d card of all time, and that's nice for OEMs and a handful of windows-using graphic designers, but the margins just aren't there. They lost the 3d race more than 5 years ago. ATI is barely keeping up and their driver quality is too poor to help them win.

Nvidia just owns the 3d market now, have for the last 2 years or more.

Re:ATI Would Be Happy

[Darren Winsper]

Err...barely keeping up? Go look at the reviews for the Radeon 9700.

Re:ATI Would Be Happy

[billcopc]

Oh come on! If you can get one display working, then adding a second is trivial. You just need a second RamDac reading a separate area of your display memory, and make sure your display driver plays nice with the OS. It certainly is beyond most of our capabilities, but then how many people have the knowledge and equipment to build their own video cards in the first place ? Not very many. But for those in the business, they know what they're doing, and they don't need to look over the other' shoulder to figure out simple problems like these.

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[mstorer3772]

"If that really is the case, it means that TNT2 cards are capable of all the neat tricks gforce cards only allot slower."

Kinda sorta but not really. An updated driver for a TNT2 board could emulate in software all the silicon a TNT2 is missing. That's true regardless of what card you have. There are software-only OpenGL drivers out there. ...but that's not really what you're after, is it? Maybe I just didn't understand you. I usually understand raving loonies just fine (professional courtesy and all that :P), but you're thinking just strikes me as a little out of kilter.

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[t0qer]

Great another raving looney :P

Well, I used to work with the guys from play inc. One of them basically explained how the snappy video snapshot worked.

Their custom chip was sort of combination of rom/ram and logic. The rom acted as a bootstrap for basic parrelel port communications. The ram would store code downloaded via the parrelel port, and the logic would chew on that.

Basically the snappy never really got any REAL upgrades to the hardware. (note this is where nvidia and play differs, nvidia adds faster hardware) Versions 1 2 and 3 of the snappy were all nothing more than "soft upgrades"

I think nvidia cards work in the same fashion, that's why we see such an performance increase between driver releases because the actual chip logic is loaded at boot.

1. Preboot, vga compatible mode
2. Boot, load custom OS specific hardware register code
3. Load OS specific driver for glue between the OS and the hardware (which is really software)

There is only so much you can do from calls to the OS for speed. If on the otherhand you could "soft upgrade" the hardware on boot, everytime you optimized that boot software a little more, it would stand to reason that the card would run faster.

So basically if you wanted to add that "gwhiz AA x4" feature to your card, you could write it in software, and load it into your card at boot.

Like I said earlier, nvidia open sourcing it would probably lead to a lot of the newer cards features being found on older cards, only a helluva lot slower. This too, is a reasonable assumption because the hardware is slower. It's no less capable of running the same code though.

Hope that clears things up.

This is awesome!

[Lethyos]

Hah! You know, everyone should go read this post I made in reference to the Slashcode changes.

I mentioned how CmdrTaco and friends will never defeat the trolls because they are some of the most ingenius and inventive Slashdot users. This is a perfect example. Way to go sllort! Thanks for proving me right!

All the changes to Slashcode will do is hurt the users who do not troll. Stupid Taco.

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[Quarters]

I'll try to sum it up for you in simple terms, since you can't seem to grasp the concept.

TNT2 doesn't have the transistors to do hardware transform and lighting. It can't do pixel and vertex shaders. Those can only be done in dedicated hardware or on the CPU. No amount of driver source code will change that.

Via proper software drivers (OpenGL and/or DirectX) TNT2 cards can *already* run games that use pixel and vertex shaders. It's just that since the card is offloading all of those calcuations to the CPU the programs are intolerably slow.

Please take your random thoughts to logical conclusions before posting insipid open letters to corporations.

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[Quarters]

So basically if you wanted to add that "gwhiz AA x4" feature to your card, you could write it in software, and load it into your card at boot.

Total BS. The registers to do HW T&L don't exist on anything below a GeForce 1 card. The registers to do pixel and vertex shaders don't exist on anything below a GF3 card.

There is no way you could write a new driver for a TNT2 card that would allow it to do those advanced features. Give up the pipe dream. A programable pipleline graphics card != a simple video convertor box. It doesn't matter how much you believe that the hardware/software design behind a Snappy can be transfered to a video card, it just isn't going to work.

Here's a letter I wrote...

[Lethyos]

The parent is 100% correct. They need to hear from real, genuine customers who are interested in their products because of their support for open source. Here's a letter I composed to the contact on the press release. Do NOT copy this word-for-word. It is only meant to give an idea of what we should probably be saying. (Incidently, the letter is entirely true. That is also important.)

Greetings!

I have used an NVIDIA TNT2 for the past several years, and have been hesitant to buy a new 3D card lately. The offerings have (mostly) all been good, but I've been looking into which company was most willing to support open source initiatives. I choose open source because I believe the community is able to produce superior products compared to closed source alternatives. As a result, I look to purchase from companies who are willing either to make their products available and interoperable with open source technologies, or make contributions the open source community can use.

Today, I read NVIDIA's announcement (http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?IO=IO_20020719_726 9 "NVIDIA Open Sources Cg Compiler Technology") and was immensely pleased. As a direct result, my decision was made. I took the plunge and picked up an NVIDIA GeForce 4 Ti based video card on my way home from work. I'm incredibly happy with the product (performance under XFree86 is excellent) and the company that produced its core technology.

In conclusion, I want to make it clear that this purchase was triggered by NVIDIA's move to open source Cg. This makes a powerful technology available to those of us who chose not to be bound to one vendor's idea of how the industry ought to be shaped. I am eager to remain an NVIDIA customer as your company enables my platform of choice!

Re:Here's a letter I wrote...

[Anonymous Coward]

My god what a brown nosed fuckhead.

Re:Here's a letter I wrote...

[Lethyos]

My god, an anonymous coward.

Re:Here's a letter I wrote...

[Anonymous Coward]

tofuchute@hotmail.com - kiss my ass!

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[t0qer]

Microcode updates? Bios Updates? Programmable Grid Arrays? Ever hear of any of these? Probably not.
I won't flame you, you obviously don't know enough about hardware to make any logical conclusions yourself..

Why NVidia will never release driver source

[DragonHawk]

"Now if only they would do the same with their drivers!"

I known someone who once worked for MetroLink. He was part of the team that was writing the NVidia device driver for Metro-X. They were a source licensee, under NDA, yadda yadda, so they had access to the NVidia driver source.

He said that the NVidia driver source is highly coupled with the chip design. Apparently, the NVidia driver people have intimate knowledge of the hardware design, and take advantage of it. This lets the driver exploit as much of the hardware's potential as possible. However, it also means that the driver has specific knowledge of the hardware design.

Given that NVidia's sole business is chip design, you can bet that they will never release source for that driver. It contains too much of their business. (No, it is not a chip schematic, but that isn't the point. It contains enough to make their lawyers unhappy.)

For better or worse, that is the way it is with NVidia. If you do not like it, do not buy their cards.

Re:Why NVidia will never release driver source

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, Somebody, mod this up. This is exactly the reason that nVidia, ATI, Matrox, 3Dlabs, SIS, Via, whoever will not open source their drivers. The contents would be a goldmine for the other companies in that list.

It's called trying to retain a competative advantage in a very cut throat sector.

wait for the RenderMonkey from ATI

[Anonymous Coward]

and the 9700, we can all then watch en-vid-E-uh play catch up for a change (like the nv1 & early riva hehe)

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[Rothron the Wise]

Would you PLEASE stop talking about stuff you obviously know nothing about? There is no PGA in the TNT. A bios/microcode update cannot make up for the lack of vertex and pixel shader silicon.
In fact: you cannot even emulate the vertex and pixel shader path in software because there is no
way of inserting it into the correct rendering path on the TNT2.

You cannot emulate rendering 16 textures at once by rendering several times either because there is not enough framebuffer alpha accuracy to do it.

You're living in a land of make believe,
with elves and fairies and little frogs with funny green hats!

Re:Seems like just another layer to keep coders ou

[Anonymous Coward]

hey, where did wise t0qer go?

You look like a fucking moron now, t0qer!

Open Source nVidia drivers

[Anonymous Coward]

the forgotten project utah-glx , to which nVidia donated code to get the TNT* cards going for XFree86 has actually continued the developement, ported the code to XFree86 4.x and added support for Geforce2 - as GF2 and Geforce4mx shares the same GPU it may be possible to at least support the lower end nVidia cards in XFree86

however... still think the binary drivers sucks, I bought an ATI instead, and I'm perfectly happy with it, better TV-out too :)

Ignorance is bliss...

[mallan]

Cg is 100% source code compatible with the syntax of the DX9 HLSL, and the OpenGL 2.0 focus group is looking at Cg vs. 3DLab's proposal for inclusion in OpenGL 2.0.

The upshot is that if Cg is accepted as the shading language for OpenGL 2.0, DX9 and OGL 2.0 would have the EXACT same syntax.

Even if it isn't accepted as the shading language for OGL2, you will be able to write shaders in Cg and have them work on OpenGL 1.4+, and DX8+.

HAHA

[sulli]

brilliant.

I can't believe that's the real reason

[Art Tatum]

You can't tell me that the competition's engineers don't have access to electron microscopes.

I think a much more likely reason is that some portions of the code are copyrighted by entities other than nVidia.