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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.
They are trying to get devolper interest, not announcing the open card. Its a different story. Although I may have missed the story you are referring to? :)
Can your karma go above being Excellent?
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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Hardly a dupe, since the project has risen from speculation to preliminary specs and a petition.
Do you see what I did there?
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.
Indeed, this card is being designed as the ideal desktop-card for open-source systems with open-source drivers and firmware. Any gaming performance, while unlikely, should be treated as a bonus.
I have already pledged my intention to buy one of these cards just out of curiosity.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
"use an operating system that has been designed for it"
We are designing our operating system for exactly what we want. I think you missed the point of Free Software.
I think the company would make a ton of money just making these as a reference platform and selling them to University students looking for a way to program their own GPU on the cheap for research purposes. Heck, Xilinx should do it themselves, and give all these students exposure to Xilinx parts (and their crappy design software) before they even find out who Altera is.
This project looks interesting. I'd sign on to help out, but this gets dangerously close to what my Day Job is, and I don't think my management would smile on my participation...
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.
tech source makes graphics cards for sun microsystems computers, i've got a raptor in one of my ultrasparc10's. I'm sure they have some fabrication experience, just visit their website, they've got quite a few products.
Wgat sense does this make. There are some people (not me) that might pay up to $500 for the newest ATI or Nvidia cards. But they do that with the knowledge that the hottest 3D applications will take advantage of them. More importantly, that is the price they might pay for those cards today. It's well known that in six months those cards might be worth half that, in a year perhaps around $100. How can anyone say how much you would be willing to pay for the final product when by that time it might not even compete with the $100 cards?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Yeah, it COULD happen. But it will also be crap. Does anyone really think a company could simply start competing with nVidia or ATI on features and power?! Heck, 3dfx couldn't do it. Matrox essentially gave up. And what about Virge?! Dare I even mention bitboys?!
Come one folks, let's get real.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
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 ;)
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
while not exactly a GF6800, it does use a FPGA, which may lend itself to some interesting modifications.
I can see it now: custom logic patches to change the core for extra performance on your favorite game...
The difference between spam and poop is that you don't have to dig through septic tanks looking for real food. -- Me
""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?""
Repeat after me. Hardware is not software. Software is not hardware
Overestimating is not any better than underestimating.
"If anything, development of a good "open-source" 3D card could be hampered by patents."
I've said as much elsewere. The vorbis people have shown that patents can be dealt with. However graphics is considerably more complex.
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I am glancing at the specs and I have a couple thoughts.
The first is that these are respectable specs - providing you don't want to to any gaming.
I think that is a really important caveat. I know that every once in a while people get all excited because the usual suspects port there games to Linux - you know ID and Blizzard come to mind.
It is a good thing that these two companies do this, but it is a bad thing that there are really only two companies that do this with anything approaching reliability.
Thing is... a card with these specs, especially considering that it is a year if not more away from reality will never cut it for any sort of gaming. You are going to produce a card with 3D support that doesn't have the muscle to handle any 3d games that are produced.
If you are fine with that then there is nothing wrong with those specs. This card will be able to handle email, porn and movies as well as anything ATI produces.
My 2nd thought is a bit more practicle.
Actually there may not be anything practicle about it. Might just be wishful thinking really.
What about 3DFX? What about OPENGL?
Between the two things isn't half the work already done?
I know it might seem insane - nuts even, but back in the day 3dFX had some very respectible hardware. They didn't fail cause there stuff was poop, they failed cause they underestimated nVidia (which in turn underestimated ATI). The hardware is still out there, the code is still out there. It just isn't being utilized.
Would there be anything wrong with utilizing these old resources to achieve this goal?
I can't wait for these to come out so I can put one in my Indrema... Imagine how many FPS I'll get in Duke Nukem Forever!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The proposal itself does not look like it is going over well. Look at the comments on the Tech's proposal site and you will see flames about the card not holding up to the standards of gaming such that ATI and nVidia do. If they are able to find programmers and developers that are superb at their jobs, maybe even ex-ATI or ex-nVidians, the card has a great chance at surviving among its rivals. Furthermore, ATI never had good software to begin with [drivers, etc] compared to their hardware. Opensource has also always seemed to prevail in one aspect or another in comparison to closed source. the development is a great idea, and even if it does not take off right away, it is a step in the right direction...
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Osho
FPGAs are also slower than ASICs. This, and the cost, are the reasons why commercial manufacturers use ASICs. You may have a great design, but if it is limited by the performance of your FPGA you lose.
FPGAs are designed to be universal, and to do that they feature programmable interconnects. But the number of those interconnects is limited, and many FPGA designs are thus constrained. You may have plenty of gates left and no way to get to them... With ASICs this is not a problem because if you need a wider bus you build it there, on your own silicon. In FPGAs the busses are already there, and you can't add more.
Yet another concern is tools. Xilinx, for example, offers a free download of some bare minimum tools. They work OK if you are making a door lock with RS-232 control. But they fail miserably, to the point of being unusable, on a complex design - which this one is. Better tools, such as Synplify, will cost you your yearly salary. How many developers have access to that kind of tools? And once you switch to some specific tool you are committed.
Finally, there is a problem with skills of developers. There are many s/w developers who are very good with C/C++. But not that many are good with Verilog (and its wickedly evil predecessor, VHDL :-) Hardware design is very, very different from software design. And you can't debug it, you only can simulate it. Simulation tools, such as ModelSim, are absolutely not free on the level that you need for this design.
To summarize, this project can be done, but not by a bazaarful of people but a small, dedicated band of wizards who locked themselves up in a small cathedral. Even if these wizards release their works, none of mere mortals will be even able to open their files, since the tools to do that are not free.
And besides, why would any sane person, who is not burdened with FOSS thoughts, want to buy such a card even for $100? This cash buys you a decent entry-level Quadro, and if anyone suggests that this design can beat Quadro I won't believe that...
And if anyone wants a real entry-level card, then it can be had (Vanta TNT2, for example) for $10 in any bargain bin, at many places. Beat that first.
without dividers, perspective interpolation is going to be pretty tough
Perhaps there exists a cheap ASIC divider/trig unit (a 487?) that they can use as a coprocessor...
The way I see it, most of the cost of the latest ATi or nVidia cards is to cover R+D expenses. The fact that the price drops drastically in a year or two is evidence of this.
The advantage of an open source hardware project isn't just that you have documentation for the hardware and can therefore write drivers for it. The real advantage is the same advantage that open source software gives you; namely that you can hack on it and make it better.
Imagine an open source video chip project that you could send design patches to in the same way that you can send patches to the Linux kernel. There could be simulation software to run tests with, and if you wanted some reference chips, you could download a snapshot spec and take it to a fabricator. In fact, there's a business opportunity right there. You could take orders and print chips on a regular release cycle, say twice a year. Of course, I didn't RTFA, but might this not be what this company is proposing?
Sure, it might be a bit expensive now to have chips printed, but if there is a demand for this kind of service, the price will drop and the options will multiply. Eventually, you might be able to buy a kit at Radio Shack that will burn chips equivalent to today's high end graphics chips. And when that happens, there will be this open source (GPL?) chip spec waiting for you to burn, and there will be a driver ready for it when the HURD is finally released.
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Woops, ive been using a terminal too much.
I was scouring this thread looking for someone else to say this because I knew couldn't be the only one to realize it.
I have never understood this project. If they want to start with something at least equivalent to a five year old SGI graphics pipeline abd build from there, then I'd say go for it. But the specs on this card don't look any better than the stuff you get right OOTB with an intel chipset (which, after sufferng with this goddamned nvidia system for too long now, is the reason I'll not be buying another AMD system).
So is the whole point of this card just to pick up the slack for AMD?
I've heard that 3D cards of today are exponentially increasing in number of transistors. It's been said that the problem of displaying 3D is "embarrassingly parallel". Hence, the performance of these cards far outstrip the CPU for parallel processing.
Some of the thoughts expressed by experts are that 3D cards may become general purpose parallel computing cards.
If it weren't for bottlenecks in the AGP bus, it would be possible to use 3D cards of today for more general purpose computing (I'm fuzzy on what the actual hold ups are here...timing issues?).
There have been Slashdot discussions about using the graphics card for audio processing, because audio is usually less than a 32 bit stream. The problem is that audio and often general purpose computing have "real time" requirements.
Also, make sure your open source card supports ARB_fragment!
A tiny software company who put it together "on their lap" literally, without any billion dollar investments a-la Microsoft. Never underestimate the power of a small group of highly educated, passionate individuals. I bet most of the work that goes into cutting-edge graphics chips is done by a team of 5-10 people. Can such a team be put together outside NVidia/ATI? You bet!
Because what you said is stupid. Five to ten people who know what they're doing is enough to put something like this together in two years time, tops. Granted, their product won't give you GeForce 6800 performance in its first incarnation, but these days it has become a lot easier to design custom logic. Besides, they're essentially "standing on the shoulders of the giants", so they already know what _not_ to do.
>if it were... it would be a terminal amount!
Hahahaha! Oh I'm a pathetic shell of a human.
+5 Korny!
Hahahaha! Oh I'm a pathetic shell of a human. :)
There's no need to bash yourself in that manner, it's perfectly all right to make a pun every now and then
the hardware industry is based on obsolescence. A company like Nvidia wants to have their -current- and -in production- card to be as fast as possible. Once it's not in production anymore, they don't care. If they released the drivers and (expecially) the specs to the card, someone(s) could improve the driver, and thus make the card perform better, or add a useful property, thus making it more attractive and thus hurting sales of the current card. An opensource driver and specs would also mean that obscure/niche OSs (BeOS, neutrino, skyOS etc.) could be supported by the older card, thus making it moore attractive and....
This, in addition to the very god point made by the poster above.
Sigged!
You know, with HP and IBM saying they're backing Linux, and HP selling linux laptops, I'd say they should try get help from there. If they're going to succeed, they need a vendor anyway, and what better way than HP's linux laptops? Adapt the chips to both desktop and laptop formats, get a high rate sales like HP and everyone will be happy: the linux community because it'll finally happen, the company because they're making money, and the customers because they've got 100% Linux support on their hardware, which to me is the best price/value to find right now!
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
ATI already supposed specs for their R2xx cards. So everything up to a ATI 9200 has accelerated 3d support under X.org using the standard radeon driver. You won't get speeds as fast as the ATI drivers and some things like texture compression aren't supported due to patents but it gives good performance for something like chromium b.s.u and tux racer.
Check out gatos.sourceforge.net for info on the open source video input/output support for ati cards.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
I hup, for your sake, that you quit these lame puns.
--- Egads, I glow in the dark!
Tech Source is the company that supplies cards for our Solaris workstations. The driver quality is pretty decent, but we are only doing 2d. I would guess that they are fully capable of doing a good 3d card though. My only qustion would be price, as I think we paid $300 for our last Tech Source card, and it was a 64meg card.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Clearspeed http://www.clearspeed.com/ is just coming to market with their CSX600 'application accelerator' processor.
It has 96 execution elements, 96 ops simultaneously for your data. Sounds like ideal for graphics processing. Power consumption 5 watts, 50 GFlops of computing power.
And they make PCI-X cards for PC systems. You can have several cards in one system for compounded processing power. Now, all this monster would need is the graphics output parts and drivers. They even have a full development kit for both Windows and Linux. The card's programmed in C.
Perhaps the PC's of the future would have two CPU's, one linear general purpose CPU (current x86 based) for program code and system management and one massively parallel CPU for tasks better suited for it. If there's no one true road to happiness, make it two then.
Might want to consider setting up a site for people to register their interest and potential orders, not just how much you would pay for but actually get the orders.
I don't remember if it was successful, but Sony has done this in the past. I know it failed once due to (I believe) a weblogic crash due to too many orders or weak system.
If the website is mentioned every time a story appears on slashdot or some other site, you can continue to accumulate and update information. If you make transparent the financials behind it, people may rush in to get you over the threshold of a precalculated breakeven point (including reasonable profit of course).
Personally I am in the market for a graphics card in the next 6 months. I am planning on getting the best I can afford at the time, and am curious what this project might offer to sway me. Sure performance is not likely to beat the top of the line of the other competitors at the same price point.. at least that is what one would guess. Maybe not true? Well, the FPGA looks really cool.
Consider that the fastest supercomputer in the world is the GRAPE-6 (GRAvity PipE) built on FPGAs for simulation of gravitational interactions (of globular clusters, etc.).
I was thinking it might be closer to something insanely great if you go for the multiple channels now for example. Maybe if you ask about that on your site you'll get people to agree. (How much more would it cost? etc.).
Also I don't know what the FPGA would promise, presumably quick firmware updates from the net of course. Could part of it be used for another purpose, or is that too difficult? Could an additional FPGA be turned into a chip that runs linux (use it on a PC) or perhaps be flashed with the results of another project (I'd love to have a Perl chip.. make it and they will come?) Could another chip or expanded memory provide say a video wall controller with edge blending for multiple screens in realtime? This kind of thing alone might sell enough to make it useful. What do commercial image processors have that this couldn't?
I just saw a sexy video switching fabric thingy here
I am curious about what exact "X.org eye candy" this would enable. I am guessing some of: "Direct Link for this comment Brilliant, and about time By Bryan Kagnime (IP: ---.polarnet.ca) - Posted on 2004-11-28 08:23:43 I don't really care so much for the 3d gaming aspect, distribute with the card an opensource operating system like Slackware with some 2d desktop eyecandy (translucency/transparency/openGL) and I'll buy a card for everyone I know with a comp. This'll show users *what* linux is all about, distrobuting a superior product and opening the market share for innovators." ?
One post on osnews mentioned realtime encoding/decoding of video streams, and though I am not sure this would not still impact the rest of the machine considering the design, that sounds neat!
128MB is enough to hold a couple frames of 20 times the resolution of a 1024x768 screen and still have over 30 MB left over. What if it included support for edge/corner blending and warping for a video wall? Is it conceivable that this could take the output from a fast consumer card and provide 2D warping and other effects for displays using multiple projected patches? Consider what it is good at. How about talking over the network or other bus to other oss graphics cards for multiple projector support.
If some nonvolatile memory was included, the card could remember a video wall wallpaper and open window/document information, or keep some megapixel images or something else always available. Would this be useful, say for quick startup or as a backup for important memories?
How about selling with an external patchbay that can take many video sources and provi
Even though this is scheduled for a year in the future, I don't think standard TVs will be gone away by then, and good TV-out support is something absent in ATI/NVidia video cards. S-Video is missing from the PDF spec.
The absolute #1 focus for this card (if they hope to get people to pay more than $30 for it) needs to be fully reprogramable by mere mortals. It would be absolutely wonderful to get a general-purpose FGPA in a computer. People pay more than $100 for crypto cards, video capture cards, etc because hardware is so much better at those tasks. This would wipe the floor with them, because you could program in a new codec or cipher.
Even if it didn't have any video-output at all, I'd still pay $100+ for a PCI card version. Once video encoding apps are optimized to send the processing that's hardest on the CPU to the FGPA instead, I expect we'll see huge increases in encoding speed. That, BTW, also leads to much more complex codecs (MPEG-6 anyone?) that reduce filesize/bitrate significantly.
Besides that, I would also like to see a bit of effort in making sure it works on non-x86 hardware. Since this company makes video cards for SPARC systems, I that surely would not be difficult for them to handle.
If this thing actually sees the light of day, it will completely change what a videocard is. This also strikes me as a potentially piviotal moment in computer hardware. Perhaps, a few years from now, the biggest graphics card maker will have a museum wing dedicated to remember how it all started back in 2004. Yeah, I know it's a stretch, but this really does have that potential.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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http://www.icculus.org/manticore/
Manticore already exists for some time and it is also what they call Open Hardware. If they could work together, this could result into a good implementation for a Linux/Un*x hardware design.
F/OSS & IT Consultant
No one has to write an OpenGL driver from scratch. You just start with MESA and start offloading stuff to hardware as much as you can. It's not a great route to a great system, but it's a straigh forward route to something that works and is feature complete.