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Talking with Timothy Miller

Posted by Hemos on from the get-to-know dept.

barryman_5000 writes "Timothy Miller has written plenty of drivers for the open source effort and now kerneltrap has an interview with him on his newest effort for an open graphic card. He talks about his background, struggle with secretive 3D vendors and more."

7 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. duh by Mr_Silver · · Score: 3, Interesting
    He has observed that there is a growing trend by graphics hardware vendors to provide less and less information to free and open source operating system developers.

    This is because the graphics card market depends on vast amounts of R&D and producing a product that is technically superior to everything else out there. Essentially being continually ahead of the game as your competitiors try to catch up.

    As much as OSS advocates would not like to hear it, opening up the graphics card specifications to all and sundry would be the equivilant of pooring your R&D down the pan. Selling support for graphics cards doesn't keep you in business - making a product that kicks the ass of your competitors (and them having difficulty working out how to beat it) does.

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  2. iD-eal project for Carmack by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Interesting


    JC should stick some of his $ behind this project instead of making rockets.

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
  3. All we need now is a petition for its support! by essreenim · · Score: 2, Interesting
    This is really interesting

    ..and all graphics manufacturers that did publish specs have stopped doing so..

    Y. nVidia are probably the most helpful to the community yet have 2 sets of Linux drivers - the OSS ones and the closed (official) ones.

    A: Does the project have an official name?

    Timothy Miller: Depends on what you mean by "official". We're calling ourselves the "Open Graphics Project",

    cool, now Ill be able to play the doom3 engine with OpenGL and OpenGP ..

    All geometry and vertex processing will be done in software in the host computer.

    This is a bit disappointing. Ever played a game in S/W mode? Nightmare - last century. At least its only a part of the processing though.

    Keep in mind that no graphics card on the market can fully support Doom III, with all features turned on, at a high framerate. So the fact that a card like this couldn't handle it shouldn't surprise anyone.

    True. I still turned up all my settings for Doom3 though and just played at a lower fps on an nVidia Geforce FX 5700 256. It was playable (on Linux with the latest nVidia Linux drivers)..

    Anyways, I'm getting one as soon as it comes out, if it comes out!!

  4. Re:gonna party like it's 1999 by the_maddman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But they're implementing this in a FPGA. Geometry processing would take up to many gates in the FPGA. Just fitting what they have listed already will be a challange. If they can make it work, I'll buy one. Maybe the next generation will be an ASIC and have more gates to spend on features.

  5. FOSS by Deanalator · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I would have no problem dropping 100 or so dollars on a card that could do 2000fps in glxgears with an open source driver in the main kernel tree (on par with my current geforce3 ti200).

    These shoddy nvidia drivers really bug me, and it would be nice to see a hardware accelerated opengl X enviroment sometime in the next 5 years (before longhorn), and that is never going to happen unless we can get some real hardware support.

  6. A question not asked in the interview by jmichaelg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You couldn't get card driver specs from the card manufacturers but did you approach ATI or nVidia about building a card aimed at Linux using their chips?

  7. I'll buy one by starseeker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm not a huge gamer. bzflag is about the limit of my occasional forays into games these days. If it can:

    - accelerate all the eye candy I enjoy
    - make things like alpha transparency and video rendering fast and smooth and not impact system performance
    - allow me to manipulate 3D plots or complex CAD objects in three space in real time smoothly

    then it does what I need from a graphics card. If it can make bzflag run smoothly, so much the better. And I suspect a middling card with excellent drivers will stack up OK for normal worka against a really fast card with iffy drivers. Plus, if this is a success they might make better cards in the future.

    Guys, let's make this the standard card for non-gaming open source boxes. Especially if it's a quality piece of work. That counts for quite a lot, too - solid hardware is a blessing if you don't have the $$ to casually replace it.

    --
    "I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org