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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."

24 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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    Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
    1. Re:duh by pe1rxq · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There might be a lot of R&D, but also a lot of crap.

      Thinking that you can hide this precious R&D in software without anyone seeing is nonsense. (The software interface is all that is needed for writting drivers). Your competitor is going to need at most a few weeks more before they dissassembled everything. If that is enough for them to steal your market your card wasn't as far ahead as you thought.

      This 'black magic beyond us mere mortals' attitude is exactly what is to blame for this kind of thing spreading. (ie NVidea not releasing specs to their ethernet chip which ofcourse contains a lot of expensive R&D) Most stuff simply isn't as impressive as those companies want you to think.

      Jeroen

      --
      Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
    2. Re:duh by farnz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      All a decent specification document reveals is how to tell a particular chip what to do, not how that chip does it. Any competitor knows what a chip is supposed to do (you can get that information by disassembling a binary driver, or by monitoring the bus while you send the binary driver commands), so the only "IP" you risk losing is the discovery that your "hardware" features are implemented by the device driver.

      --
      I appear to have a blog. Odd.
    3. Re:duh by radish · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What's an NDA got to do with anything?

      How can I possibly write and publish an open source driver to an interface, if that interface us under NDA?

      --

      ---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"

    4. Re:duh by Lisandro · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      Well, that's fine; i don't want the silicon blueprints for their beloved R&D. I just want specs on the interface which lets me use that particular hardware. As much as graphic vendors would like us to beleive, there's not much that can be "stolen" from gfx card specs. Don't take my word for it; just check the ones available for older cards and see how much you can get from there.

      I think GFX vendors are reluctant of releasing specs for a number of reasons. One, it leaves them in a controlling position, since they dictate what you will and won't be able to do with your beloved card. Two, some parts of GFX cards might contain licenced technologies (stuff like MPEG decodig, perhaps? texture compression?), but still, we can do without. And three, almost every major GFX vendor has been caught cheating in their drivers (oh, oh, "optimizing"), which leads me to beleive more than one common GFX card might be software crippled. Hell, ATI had a card in which you could unlock four pipelines with a small program.

      Desiging GFX hardware is hard, and writting driver is too. Yet, why can't you release specs for hardware we bought? There's an amount of zealotry to the OSS desire of open-source-for-everything, but if anything benefits from open source, that is system drivers. GFX cards or anything else.

    5. Re:duh by Tough+Love · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think you fill find this card goes no where. It will be slower and more expensive than the "closed" cards from nVidia.

      I thought that at first as well. But I changed my mind after looking at the design drafts, the card specs, and the quality of the people involved. This is going to be the classic enthusiast's card. It's reprogrammable at the logic level! The uses aren't limited just to Linux video.

      The point of this thing is to open it up to widespread hacking. I'll gladly pay considerably more than a commodity card to have it hackable. Just think, this thing could spawn a hardware demo scene for one thing.

      I'm pretty sure there are enough like-minded people to make this project commercially viable. It doesn't have to take over the world, it just has to fly, then the sky's the limit. There is of course nothing stopping a spinoff card from being developed in hard silicon after the original is thoroughly debugged, which would bring the unit cost way down, and be much easier to cost justify. But as far as I can see, this is going to fly just fine as an FPGA design.

      By the way, it's an OpenGL card. It won't support programmable shaders, at least in this version, but it will be capable of running Quake III. Of course, you will be able to implement your own shaders at the gate level if you are smart enough and some people certainly will be, I look forward to some mind-blowing demos. You could also set the gate array up to do something entirely unconnected with video, such as run a kick-ass synthesizer or image processing or encryption.

      I want it now.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  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. Re:Erm... by koi88 · · Score: 3, Funny


    "Has wrote?"

    Should be: "Has writed"

    --

    I don't need a signature.
  4. Re:Erm... by nomadic · · Score: 2, Funny

    Didst writeth?

  5. Alternative OSs by DrSkwid · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  6. 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!!

  7. Re:June 2005?! by wild_berry · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I cant work out if you're being sarcastic. You didn't mention running Duke Nukem Forver on it, so I think you may be serious.

    And thank you for being the first post to talk about the card and/or article, not spelling or grammar.

    In the Article, Mr Miller says he's heard quotes "I'd rather buy a used Rage128 from eBay". When this card becomes available, my Rage128 (Pro Ultra) will be on ebay.co.uk. Just so you can be ready ;)

    I don't know if it will actually be an upgrade to my system, or a sidegrade, but I think this is like buying Fair Trade goods: those traded to afford a broad selection of producers some of the money thrown around by the rich developed world. I.E. I will buy one because I believe in the principle over (perceived lack of) the features.

  8. Exactly by gandell · · Score: 2, Funny

    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.
  9. 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.

  10. I would by this card in a second. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  11. Thx mods by barryman_5000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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"

    1. Re:Thx mods by Yaa+101 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Don't worry, you will grow a thick skin sooner than later, at least you have a item submitted, I bet most of the grammar winers did not... ;)

  12. Petition If you're planning on buying one of these by iplayfast · · Score: 2, Informative

    Make you visible to TS new open 3d videocard

    Let the company know what the demand is.

  13. 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.

  14. 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?

  15. Re:But.... by Theovon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sure, I don't see why not. With open specs, it can be ported to ANY platform.

  16. 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
  17. It seems that the ignorance is yours! by Theovon · · Score: 2, Informative
    Contrary to what you say, this card is designed a priori to accelerate 3D graphics. The rendering engine is designed to be OpenGL compliant.

    It seems that you didn't read the article and have no idea what this project is all about. None. At all.

  18. It's beginning to sound good by pherthyl · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.