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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."
I've kind of waited for this for years.
In theory other companies might steal the design and build and sell the card on their own, but if the design is community-owned, then that actually works to lower prices...
Anonymous Cow
Building a good open 2D card? Mabye... I doubt it's really feasible, but have at it. Chase that dream.
But a 3D card? You are going to make a card to run the latest Quake and Doom? Or even release back of the games? Do you realize how much time, how many thousands of man hours go into these cards? The dollar amount for the simulators, the fabs to make the prototypes, etc
This could however, make a great teaching tool.
I take it back... 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. Target your audience carefully and don't get caught up in the IdSoftware upgrade cycle! :)
Agile Artisans
This is a really great idea, but it will probably never work, a mailing list will bring way to many points of view.
Really what a project like this needs is the developer to shut out the open source community, until the project is done. If linus had made a large project out of the original kernel, I seriously doubt if it would have ever been completed. This should be kept simple, and then open sourced, only once there is a good code base to build from.
I can understand that this card will never compete with ATI and nvidia which raises the question, is there any reason why ATI can't open source their old graphic cards, such as their 7000 series. Surely that technology is no longer critical to their lead. Sure many of those cards aren't being sold any more, but there are still plenty around and this may open up a niche market so they can produce some as a low-cost device.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
If you'd read-up on this subject, you'd have seen that these folk *do* know their hardware. They are also not being overly ambitious. While they expect to be able to develop a card which has 3D accelleration for desktop applications, they make no bold claims about gaming.
Falling anywhere short of, say, OpenGL 1.4 support would make it pretty much useless. In other words, it doesn't have to have pixel shaders, but it has to have good, filtered texture mapping, lighting, alpha, quite a bag of stuff. The Spartan 3 (not III as the tech spec suggests) has 1.5 million gates and 384 MHz, which ought to be enough for a decent 3D core, with one catch: it's got 32 18x18 multipliers, no dividers. Don't even think about floating point, obviously, but without dividers, perspective interpolation is going to be pretty tough. Without perspective interpolation... well, think "1970's".
I just hope there's a standard way of getting around this. Any hardware hacks out there?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Odds are that your CPU doesn't have a divider on it either.
Google for Newton-Raphson.
Fast hardware dividers are big and expensive - somewhat more expensive than a multiplier. But if you have a multiplier and you're not too concerned about performance, or are happy to tradeoff precision for performance, then you can do division using your multiplier, a small seed ROM and a microcode engine.