Open Source Graphic Card Project Seeks Experts

An anonymous reader writes "Could this dream of many open source developers and users finally happen? A 100% open sourced graphic card with 3D support? Proper 3D card support for OpenBSD, NetBSD and other minority operating systems? A company named Tech Source will try to make it happen. You can download the preliminary specs for the card here (pdf). The project, though a commercial one, wants to become a true community project and encourages experts and everyone who have good ideas to add to the development process to join the mailing list. You can also sign a petition and tell how much you would be willing to pay for the final product."

Comments

Not a dupe

[BumpyCarrot]

Hardly a dupe, since the project has risen from speculation to preliminary specs and a petition.

Re:Waste of time

[eofpi]

It seems to me that 2D quality and clarity is much more important than 3D performance in their target market.

A harder problem is getting enough of the target audience to accept that they're in the target audience, because people (or at least americans; i can't speak for other cultures) like to have the possibility of doing something, even if they'll never do it (hence the ubiquity of SUVs on our roads, but i digress). This should be easier with people that use open-source software though; 3D-intensive software for those isn't nearly as common as on windows.

That said, if they can convince someone to slap it on a PCB, i'll keep an eye out for these things next time i need a video card.

False logic

[melted]

It's like saying:

"No, it's impossible to build a replacement for Microsoft Office. Do you realize how much time, how many thousands of man hours went into this software?"

But there you go, Open Office is doing pretty well.

If anything, development of a good "open-source" 3D card could be hampered by patents.

Re:False logic

[pyite]

Your logic is the fallacy. While I can't play Half Life 2 on a Voodoo 3 (or at least I wouldn't want to try), the majority of people could use WordPerfect 5.1 (a great product by the way) for most of their word processing needs. They don't need the close to $1000 price of Microsoft Office. Let's face it, there hasn't been much innovation in Office for years. MS Office is a "moving target" for OpenOffice developers as much as a tortoise is for a hunter. Graphics cards are another story, however.

Re:False logic

[nathanh]

It would be impossible for the Open Source world by itself to build a replacement for MS Office in any reasonable timeframe.

I disagree. The same thing was said about Linux back when it didn't have networking, didn't have SMP support, didn't have a journalled filesystem, etc. It only took 10 years for all those comments to become irrelevant. It turns out that 10 years is a reasonable timeframe.

In the same vein, Abiword and Gnumeric, while admittedly not as good as OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, are well on their way to being decent office applications. The KDE crowd also has their own fully-free office suite (Kword, Kspread, etc). If OpenOffice hadn't been donated then the development effort would have gone into the GNOME and KDE applications and they would be further along then they are currently. They would without doubt have been at the tipping point within 5 years; that sounds reasonable to me.

Sun helped the process along, fast-forwarding us at least 5 years, but they did not solve the "impossible".

Re:Waste of time

[Anonymous Coward]

if the card can target elementary 3D and stellar 2D, it could (in a few years) be THE card to own for a commodity Linux box.

Commodity Linux boxes already have elementary 3D and stellar 2D. It's called Intel Extreme Graphics, has open source drivers, and it costs like $10.

Just want to repeat that $10 figure again. You are a going to have to do better than Fanboyism to beat that.

Not For Quake

[MBCook]

Sure, this thing probably won't compete with a GeForce 6600 AGP in Doom 3 or HL 2 (that's a $200-$250 card), but do we really NEED that?

For 99% of users, this could be a great card. If it does great 2D, and can do good 3D (especially features like those used in Apple's Quartz, or Project Looking Glass) it would work more than well enough. Lets face it, for a large number of applications, a GeForce (origional) quality 3D would be MORE than enough for most anything many people would do. And if the graphics are localized into a small area (say a little 200x200 area of a window), then even such a card would be able to render very nice looking graphics (just like a "slow" card could run Doom 3 looking great at such a low resolution).

I'm with you. For a quality, commodity card this could be great. Plus, with the FPGA, not only could be hack the DRIVERS, you could hack the FIRMWARE! Think! You could buy the card, and write software to take the burden off the CPU for decoding MPEG2 or 4. You could even (with a little kernel help) swap firmware on the fly so you could have that video decoding, and then enter a command (or press a button on your desktop) to have the 3D firmware put in. When you're done, go back to video decoding acceleration.

Hell, make it run SETI in the background at super fast speed when just using 2D (like using nVidia cards to do scientific calculations on the GPU).

These things could be a LOT of fun to mess around with. I think I just sold myself on one ;)

Don't let them turn this into a HURD

[tetromino]

It's better to have a finished product that meets a limited set of goals than an over-engineered design that never gets properly implemented...

Re:Waste of time

[Slack3r78]

The problem is, 2D compositing is in the process of shifting to being 3D accelerated right now. OS X has been for a couple of years now, Longhorn will be, and X.org is in the process of doing so.

You end up with much smoother window rendering, and it allows you to add in things like desktop transparency and shadowing without much of a performance hit. A 2D only card may be "good enough" for some, but the desktop environments are quickly moving in a direction where that may no longer be the case by time this card would come to market. Going for at least rudimentary OpenGL support from the start would be a good idea.

Re:Great!!

[shufler]

It's not stealing if the design is open and available to all.

In fact, this is the very point of such a project. If a company comes along and wants to use it for a product they want to develop, then they can!

Re:RTFA/RTFWS/RTFE!

[mark-t]

While there _IS_ a market for 3d card that don't have gaming as the primary focus, these cards are also priced in the $1500-$2000 price range, have OpenGL 1.4 (maybe even 2.0 these days, I haven't looked at them in a while) implemented _entirely_ in silicon, and are the cutting edge choice for serious 3d cad users. Ironically, these cards aren't quite as good for gaming as the nvidia and ati cards are, because of the way games tend to do 3d.

So if they aren't competing on the gaming front, and I highly doubt they'll be able to compete on the CAD front for the price they're expecting to sell the card for, then I'm afraid this idea is going to be dead before it ever really gets a chance to start.

So if they're not shooting for ati or nvidia levels of performance... are they seriously thinking they'd be able to put out a card that could compete with the wildcat realizm cards for around $200? If so, I'd sign up, even if that's not the best card for games. As it is, however, I can't sign the petition in good conscience knowing that if the product couldn't compete with what's already out there, I'd just pass it up for something else that better suits my needs. I don't make enough money to be able to buy things I can't really use.