Modern Video Cards with Open Specs?

JessLeah asks: "I've been having trouble finding decent, 3D-accelerated drivers for video cards (of late-90s/early-2000s vintage) under Linux. I'd just get a newer card, but it seems like the situation for newer cards is even worse. The market at present seems to be little more than an nVidia/ATI duopoly, and neither nVidia nor ATI have open specifications available for their chipsets. As a result, both of them presently have binary-only, x86-only, Linux-only XFree86 drivers as their sole alternative to Windows. Are there any modern chipsets (with a reasonable cost) that actually have open specifications available online -- or, at a minimum, open-source drivers that can actually compile on things other than Linux/x86" What was the last video card with open specifications that you can remember?

Comments

I don't get it.

[escher]

Why are the drivers closed in the first place? Won't they sell more cards if they're supported by a wider variety of software?

Re:I don't get it.

[nathanh]

If ATI and NVIDIA open sourced their drivers, it would make it very difficult for them to compete with each other.

They don't have to open source their drivers. They just have to release the register information so we can write our own drivers.

Anybody who thinks the register information would give the competition an unfair advantage is nuts. We *know* what the cards do. You can work that out from the existing information. It's just the stupid numbers and bytecodes (of which they are umpty zillion to work out) that aren't known. There is no competitive disadvantage in releasing the numbers.

And anybody who think there are patents and/or trade secrets associated with register information is even more nuts. ATI/nVidia simply don't care about Linux or open source. They care about selling cards. So long as they can convince 90% of Linux users that closed-source binary-only x86-only drivers are "good enough" they will continue to screw us like this.

Re:I don't get it.

[spaceyhackerlady]

Why are the drivers closed in the first place? Won't they sell more cards if they're supported by a wider variety of software?

There are many reasons. General paranoia over possible trade secrets and concerns over support costs are the top of most lists I've seen. If you document it, you have to support it.

If they support Windows they already support such a huge customer base that the incremental gain from supporting the tiny population of non-Windows users just isn't worth it.

...laura, who wishes this wasn't the case

Re:I don't get it.

[runderwo]

Patents are a big problem. Mike Harris has stated this numerous times on the DRI development list.

The problem is that manufacturers like ATI or NVidia feel safer legally if they release no source code and do not publish specifications for their hardware. By not doing so, a nosy competitor can't possibly notice anything in NV's hardware design or their source code that infringes on a patent owned by the competitor. If such a nosy competitor did notice something, NV would end up in court over it at significant expense, and would probably have to end up cross-licensing their own patents just for a protection deal rather than for royalties.

It's simply easier legally to keep the source closed and the specs secret. The bonus is that adopting such a policy doesn't hurt sales one bit, because consumers have shown with their wallets that they really just don't want things like driver source code or programming manuals. It's a win-win for the companies involved.

Also, remember when Matrox and 3Dfx were all about open source and NV/ATI were the nasty closed source folks? All it takes is to do a "where are they now" to see what policy a conservative company would take. Nobody got rich open sourcing their drivers and publishing their specs, and at least two companies sank or nearly sank as a correlative effect (not necessarily caused by their openness). The strategic approach is to do whatever the companies that sank didn't do, so as a result NV and ATI are as closed as can be, with the exception of ATI providing some documentation under strict NDA.

The only way to change this is to hit opencores.org and start hacking on your FPGAs. Open, extensible, capable video hardware would go a long way towards humbling the secretive industry players. Once it's designed and mockups are working, real ASIC hardware can be fabbed in quantity. The FPGA gate configuration can be made freely available with the caveat that anyone who manufactures hardware using it and distributes the hardware must pass along the "source code" for the hardware, in the form of the gate configuration as well as the host-visible registers. This wouldn't exactly fit under software licenses, but maybe some contract can be drawn up to handle it.