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Talking with Timothy Miller
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."
Will it run OpenSolaris?
...what happened to this story? It's not like we haven't seen dupes before...
"Has wrote?"
Sweet jumpin' Jebuz.
Can we call these guys something other than "editors?" I'm pretty sure we're maligning the proper usage of the word here.
This is James Bond kinda stuff at its best ;)
Timothy Miller has wrote plenty of drivers ...
Yikes...
"He talks about his background, struggle with secretive 3D vendors and more.""
I guess one doesn't need IP law to keep something secret.
"Timothy Miller has wrote plenty of drivers...
Has wrote plenty of . . . ?
Has mother fucking WROTE plenty?
Honest to god, the man farts incessantly. Typically once every 15 minutes or so. And he makes no effort to disguise sound or smell.
"has wrote" Mod me down if you like, but this is bad writing. Since when did being an editor with poor language skills become OK?
What was the story before it was "disappeared"?
"Timothy Miller has wrote plenty of drivers..."
;)
/. editors have a grasp on the language they're supposedly using. Or maybe they've outsourced the job to some Philipino shop... Indians wouldn't have made such a grammatical mistake.
"Timothy Miller has written plenty of drivers..."
would be better
I'm beginning to wonder whether
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
I can't wait to buy one!
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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Kie kuas Ombroj en Mordora Land'.
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and which open source effort were they written for?
Some detail would be useful.
"Timothy Miller has written plenty of graphics card drivers for the open source ??? effort and now kerneltrap has an interview with him on his latest effort for an open graphic card. He talks about his background, struggles with secretive 3D vendors and more."
"Has Wrote"? Did this come out of a trailer park in BFV Alabama? Man, this place is getting pretty poor at writing English. Does anyone actually proof what you guys write?
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
the timing seems right as the world gets filled with frustrated PPC-users who can't even use the binary-only nvidia drivers for linux on their powerbooks...
Funny A similar argument can be made for any IP, including software patents (especially software since that's all the product is).
When I was in highschool, back in the late 80's, I developed a terminal program, ANSITerm, for my Atari ST which was unique in that it could display 80 column text in 16 colors, something that was "impossible" for the Atari ST but very important for most bulletin boards. For that, I had to write text rendering code in carefully-optimized 68000 assembly. I guess you could say that was one of my early exposures to something resembling graphics driver development.
Was that using the Atari STs 320x200 16-colour bitmapped mode with 4-pixel wide characters, or was it using the 640x200 4-colour bitmapped mode with stippling or some other effect, or even hacking the hardware to program a 16-colour 640x200 mode?
Anyone who programmed an application on 80s computers ended up banging the hardware if they wanted performance. Most games had their own drivers for the graphics hardware, and so on.
Hi. I'd like to take the collective work of hundreads and thousends of talented people and give it away for free without even asking the peeps involved. My name is Stallman. Here's my card!
Since when did being an editor with poor language skills become OK?
To make your sentence grammatically correct, please select one of the following two sentences:
Thanks for playing!
I do not want to appear to be a grammar nazi, but "has wrote plenty of drivers..." is better written, "has written plenty of drivers..."
Sorry, it's just that seeing "DirectX9 - For More Then Just Gamers?" and then this not an hour later were too much.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
HAS WRITTEN
not 'has wrote'
wtf is going on here? is everyone suddenly illiterate?
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Same Tim
These platforms, both free and non-free are valuable alternatives to the Microsoft monolith
I hate this. I don't use an "alternative" OS any more than I drink an alternative to milk or live an "alternative" lifestyle.
I know it's grammatically correct but it's the hidden implication that does my head in!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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!!
When you're reading ./, try not to get too annoyed by bad grammar. Virtually all past and present editors are terrible at spotting even the most obvious language deformations. Let's face it, bad grammar is here to stay. Let's just hope it's not contagious.
Some people these days...
barryman 5000 wrote that. Not the /. editors. Just because you hate those editors because of the fact that they reject every article that you send them DOES NOT mean they are responsible for spelling and grammar errors. The job of the /. editors is to approve stories that are interesting and relevant to slashdot.org
barryman 5000, pleez goo bak an laern Eanglich.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
Geometry acceleration was a newfangled, fancy feature five years ago. Something that previously required thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars worth of hardware. Now it's a considered a given, and there is no reason to buy a card without it.
This card is going to suck.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I am going to buy one once it comes out. To have a system which is reliable and complete open source is to me far more important than playing the latest games at high frame rates - something I have not done anyway for a long time.
$200 might be a bit steep, but if it works well...
But you do use a minority OS. And vendors do discriminate against their minority-OS customers. Draw whichever parallels you see fit.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
blah blah
Which is why driver software has never had anything to do with the success or failure of graphics cards in the market.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
www.bmtminformatica.com
mail@bmtminformatica.com
Trois anneaux pour les Rois Elfes sous le ciel
Sept pour les Seigneur Nains dans leur demeure de pierre
Neuf pour les Hommes Mortels destinés au trépas
Un pour le Seigneur Ténébreux sur son sombre trône,
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Un Anneau pour les gouverner tous, un Anneau pour les trouver
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Au pays de Mordor où s'étendent les ombres...
Especially since it's /. , not ./.
I'm sorry, old chap, but I had to. :)
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
I realize that it would be expensive but it seems to me that a truly open source card would be something very general purpose with an fpga or similar. That way everyone could have something to develop on and you would therefore get more developers. Once a fpga based design became popular enough then somebody could sell a cheap (non-programmable) version based on asics.
(It is telling that half the posts so far seem be concerned with grammar. hmm)
"Sure, there's only so much they can do to protect their IP, but why shouldn't corporations have the right to sue the shit out of people stealing their R&D?"
Like what the RIAA/MPAA/Valve/Book publishers do?
Why because I am a zeolat?
NO!
I beleive in Free software, but this is a very personally selfish reason!
I like the PowerPC platform and like to screw around on it. I know that x86 is cheaper and faster, but for what I use a computer for the Ibook is plenty fast.
However I will never buy another mac product again because newer cards are either Nvidia or ATI. The current Ibook has a ATI 9200, which is supported by Open source drivers, which means that it works with PowerPC and x86.
Nvidia and ATI binary drivers are only for x86!
So I can not every have 3d acceleration on a powerpc machine again? If I buy this OSS-friendly video card I can.
I want stability, I want freedom to use non-standard hardware setups.
I want to get 3d acceleration in OpenBSD, too!! Not just Linux!
OpenBSD is very secure, but it's worthless for the blender 3d stuff I use because no nvidia drivers or ATI drivers work with it.
The point of open source is choice. And there are very real technical reasons behind keeping all the software I use free, too.
Read this artical about "pointless ideology" and you will understand what I am talking about.
http://lwn.net/Articles/100098/
it is very important to have the ENTIRE OS Free, and not just have it no-cost.
I type "has wrote" and nearly 40 comments about how dumb I am. Next time I won't even submit news and you people can go to kerneltrap for yourselves ;)
Thx mods for fixing it to "has written"
And tiled graphics modes whilst we're at it.
...
It'd be cool to have a retro graphics chip with modern display features (32-bit with alpha channels, multiple playfields, high resolutions, etc).
Of course all these are easily emulatable on even fairly primitive graphics cards these days by using the 3D hardware. But it isn't the same
Well if the community is going to chip in, will they have the GPL on their side? Is everything going to be GPL'd? If not, why not? Where can I find this information?
"Persistence is annoying success." - ghee22 11:28:1999 - 10:53:PM
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."
How can he be motivated to work on a universal open sound card driver instead? All my video cards have worked fine under linux... sound cards have not fared as well. :|
Speak truth to power.
DOES NOT mean they are responsible for spelling and grammar errors.
But...but...they're EDITORS. EDITORS!! Oh god my head's about to explode, too much wrongness in one post!! What's the matter with you?!?
Make you visible to TS new open 3d videocard
Let the company know what the demand is.
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.
What you're not complaining about the grammer? What kind of slashdot reader are you!!!
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?
The nice thing about this design is that you can reprogram the hardware on the fly, as it's based upon an FPGA (Xilinx).y stems/overview to run on this card. Hardware HDTV-decoding for MythTV and vdr, and fanless, too. No CPU load whatsoever.
If this card comes to market, it would be fun to modify an MPEG2 decoder from http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/video_s
Not "has wrote"...
The correctest usage is "He done gone wrote"...
There is not nearly enough love in the world, but there is far too much trust.
People have been asking nVidia and ATI to open their drivers for a LONG time. They still don't want to do it.
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
(1) Many people seem to be ignorant of the fact that this graphics card has been covered previously and that the first generation will not have 3D acceleration. None. At all.
(2) The reason NVidia/ATI doesn't open up their interface to the chip is because the chip extends into their driver. The driver does things like dynamically optimizing shaders before they ever hit the chip, as well as all the benchmark cheats NVidia/ATI has laboriously built, and this could be given away if they were to open up anything. Those who say they "just want the interface" and "not the blueprints" are misunderstanding what a modern graphics card driver does.
It seems that you didn't read the article and have no idea what this project is all about. None. At all.
I've read most of the interview (sorry, it's time of exams and I don't have much free time available). Quote:
I was thinking about buying a new graphic card so that I could play some new games, such as Half-Life 2 or Doom III. I'm not a gamer nor I know much about graphic cards, but I like to play videogames from time to time. I really like the idea of an open graphic card, and I certainly would wait and pay 200 for this one.
But I need to know: which games would work fine in this graphic card? Will it play Doom III or Half-Life 2 *without* all the bells and whistles at a decent rate? If so, define to us "decent rate", also :-).
Thanks for your time and good luck with the project,
Edulix
Now can you write some decent drivers for WiFi cards?
R-T-F-A
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
What he say?!
My initial reaction to this project was "Bah, who cares about open source, my NVidia card works fine for under 100 bucks canadian".
But the more I read about this, the more enticing it sounds. I don't play games on Linux at all, so I don't care about that. And to have a nice driver, that is optimized for the new features in X11 like XRender and stuff would rock. The longer I use Linux, the less I want to bother messing around with compiling modules, so I don't even bother using the official NVidia drivers. Sounds like this will perform much better than the generic, 2D only, NV drivers.
Who knows. Might actually buy one of those. But his projected price point at $200 is too high. Even in my best "Stallmanesque" spirit, I can't justify spending over $300 canadian on this card.
Keep in mind that no graphics card on the market can fully support Doom III, with all features turned on, at a high framerate.
nonsense. nvidia 6800 series can do it just fine. 6800 ultra can support 1024x768 with full doom3 features turned on, and still get faster than monitor refresh (>100fps).
But why go with PCI only for the first release?
AGP is what everyone wants.
I suspect it is because developing glue logic to talk to the PCI bus is easier than developing glue logic to talk to the AGP bus...
This card, as it is stated in TFA, isn't meant to compete successfully in the category of "renders Doom III at appreciable speeds". It's not the result of years of R&D, and it's not bleeding-edge. It's a chance for a company to service the niche market of people who want a decent-quality card, and are willing to pay for the freeness of it. Making a product that kicks the ass of the competitors in the category of how Free-Software-compatible it is, is the idea, and I think Techsource can compete successfully with ATI and nVidia here.
Ethan
...is to provide something which encourages them to Open their specs by terrifying them even more with the consequences if they don't. A card which is fully programmable might do just that.
Not necessarily in its first incarnation, but maybe in round 2 or 3, if it gets 1% of the available market either by providing programmability features which the others can't - that get used - or by leaving expensive but seldom-critical parts off to make a cheaper chipset which gets picked up big time by ASUS or some other motherboard maker.
Remember that saving $5 on a motherboard might represent 10-20% of the manufacturing cost. If the chipset has 95% of the performance for $2-$3 less and needs no heatsink or fan where a competitor's chips do, that might just do it. Or using 30% less watts to do pretty much the same job as a chipset from the big boys might make it attractive to thin-client and laptop makers.
One programmability feature I would like to see is the ability to stack the hardware gadgets arbitrarily - e.g., if you're not going to be stretching the horsepower of the thing, plug in a second DAC and video output to run two screens (or 3, or 4) from the one card; another e.g., if you are going to stretch the hardware, perhaps you can stack 3D engines so one is precalculating the next row (or band of rows) while the other's displaying the current row (or band).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
There is no reason at all for graphics card vendors not to release full documentation for writing drivers for their cards. That will not open up any IP, and will not give their competitors any advantages. Its the actual GPU they need to protect, and they can do that just fine while allowing us to write drivers. You idiots who buy this "we need to keep it secret" BS and keep spreading the lie are the problem. If you don't know what you are talking about, then just STFU.
OpenBSD performs just fine, noticably better than FreeBSD 5.x, and just as well as NetBSD and Linux. Leave your FUD at the door please.