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Open Source Graphics Card Available For Advance Orders

Posted by timothy on from the one-blast-from-both-the-past-and-future dept.

mollyhackit writes "The Open Graphics Project, which we've been following since it first started looking for experts four years ago, has just announced that the OGD1 is available for preorder now. The design features 2 DVI, 256MB RAM, PCI-X, and a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA along with a nonvolatile FPGA for programming on boot. FPGAs are reprogrammable hardware which means the graphics card can be optimized for specific tasks and execute them faster than a general purpose CPU. The card could be programmed for certain codecs to speed up encoding or decoding. An open hardware design means potential for better driver support. Of course you could always use the FPGA for something else... say crypto cracking."

13 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Pretty crappy FPGA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The SPARTAN 3 is a hobbyist FPGA. Cheap, and a lot of gates, but slow. A Virtex 4 would've been nicer :)

    1. Re:Pretty crappy FPGA by Eric+Smith · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's unclear to me where you're getting your information, but the card uses a 3S4000, which is the second-largest Spartan-3 FPGA. It has over 60,000 logic elements, each of which has a 4-LUT and a FF. The part also has 96 parallel multipliers (18x18 two's complement) and 96 18-Kbit dual-port RAMs.

    2. Re:Pretty crappy FPGA by Eric+Smith · · Score: 5, Informative
      The Spartan 3 is a professional FPGA. It happens to be relatively inexpensive as it is targeted at ASIC replacement. The performance is lower than a Virtex 4 or 5, but the price/performance ratio is much better. The last time I got quotes, Virtex 4 parts cost about ten times as much per logic element as Spartan 3 parts.

      What most people seem to have overlooked is that this isn't an expensive video card. It's a midrange FPGA development card, that happens to be suitable for prototyping video card functionality. It is NOT intended that average users or even power users would buy this to use it as a video card.

      The plan is that this card will be used for development of the logic for a video card, which will then be realized in an ASIC in order to produce actual video cards.

    3. Re:Pretty crappy FPGA by Eric+Smith · · Score: 4, Informative

      I've seen Spartan 3 parts used in designs with lots of bandwidth and lots of I/Os. "Lots" is a relative term. Yes, you can get more bandwidth and more I/Os with a Virtex 4 or 5, but for many applications the Spartan 3 (or 3E, or 3A) are perfectly satisfactory.

  2. All video cards cost this much... by FranTaylor · · Score: 4, Informative

    At this stage of their development.

    This is not a finished product by any stretch of the imagination. These are prototypes. Back in the day prototypes were wirewrapped nightmares and they cost a lot more than $1500!

  3. you might be getting ripped off if... by fpgaprogrammer · · Score: 5, Informative

    you might be getting ripped off if you're paying $1500 for a Spartan-3 board.

    I guess they don't really have the board volume to get low prices. But If you want a graphics card for $1500 that's probably less functional than an NVidia commodity card, I'm not gonna stop you.

    OTOH, If you're interested in FPGA programming and a novice at it, you'll want to get a MUCH MUCH MUCH cheaper Spartan board (like 50 to 150). See http://digilentinc.com/ for good starter boards.
    If you're serious about FPGA programming (or just willing to pay $1500 to $3000) you will definitely want to get a board with a Virtex or Stratix on board:
    http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML501-UNI-G.htm

    If you want to have it on PCIx:
    http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML555-G.htm

    You can also get FPGAs socketted for AMD's Hypertransport bus and Intel's FSB:
    http://xtremedatainc.com/ (Altera FPGAs)
    http://drccomputer.com/ (Xilinx FPGAs)
    http://nallatech.com/
    http://celoxica.com/

    (some of these vendors also sell PCI solutions)

    FPGA programming environments still mostly suck. it's a market impeded by proprietary standards and a whole lot of NP-Hard algorithms. We're working on it...

    1. Re:you might be getting ripped off if... by fpgaprogrammer · · Score: 4, Informative

      I really hope that same type of open-source economic irrationality will help fund my open-source FPGA tools startup!

      my point is that there are a dirth of FPGA boards with better cost/performance value that could be used to prototype a graphics rendering FPGA system. Physical hardware isn't the limiting factor to an open source graphics card; the open source FPGA 3-D rendering code is the real missing piece. In fact, making a board was probably a distraction for this project because by the time the firmware is ready for real graphics workloads the FPGA on-board will be obsolete.

      Here's some examples of 3-D engines for FPGA from the 6.111 lab at MIT:
      3-D Pong (using rasterization):
      http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/s2006/PROJECT/7/main.html

      Ray Tracing:
      http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/s2007/PROJECTS/5/main.html

      There are hundreds of videos and code for FPGA projects up at http://web.mit.edu/6.111 (see project appendices for code).

  4. Re:why not pci-e based? by greg1104 · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are two entries in the FAQ about this. Short answer is "PCI is more popular with users of FPGA kits" and "PCI-X is backward compatible with your 32-bit 33MHz PCI slots".

  5. Re:Uh...not for me! by RattFink · · Score: 4, Informative

    Really? I have friends who splash out $1000s on their hobbies, whether it is robots or R/C. This is a steal in comparison to some more expensive and consuming hobbies, especially considering the (underpowered but still excellent) FPGA. You can get similar hardware for far less or far better hardware for a bit less right now directly from Xilinx if that is your thing.

    --
    "I don't necessarily agree with everything I say." - Marshall McLuhan
  6. Re:$1500 video card! by deathy_epl+ccs · · Score: 4, Informative

    Priced a Quadro FX lately?

    Yup... price of a nice GeForce and the time it takes to hack the identifier as described here.

  7. Re:$1500 video card! by petermgreen · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nah there are lots of other FPGA boards availible many of which are frankly a much better deal than this board.

    Essentilly if you don't want the card for graphics what you get is a relatively small FPGA (one of the smaller members of the spartan 3 family which is xilinx's current low end family) on a PCI-X card. This board is way overpriced for that.

    --
    note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
  8. Except it is. by pavon · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are literally thousands of FPGA prototyping boards on the market, many of which cost much less than this one. So while you could use this for other things, I can't imagine why anyone would spend the extra money unless they wanted to use the video specific features like the dual DVI interface. Furthermore, the purpose of the project is to develop an open source video card, and this card was created as a tool for those developers to experiment with.

    So, it was created to prototype a video card, and it's only practical uses are real-time video (output) processing, thus it is a video card.

  9. Re:Serious Question....Please answer if you know! by PSargent · · Score: 5, Informative

    Now that they are ready to offer the hardware, I find myself seriously considering purchasing one.

    Don't! and I'd say that to anyone. What they are offering is a FPGA dev kit, with nothing to put on the FPGA. Yes, they've done a board design, but that's really one of the easiest bits, especially as most firms that sell the chips give you sample designs that you can stitch together.

    The HDL is the key to this project, and as far as I can see they haven't produced anything beyond very basic PCI and Memory Controllers (which I'd expect to be very low performance). I looked at the same code about 2 years ago (maybe more) and it's in exactly the same state now as it was then. I say this as someone who writes VHDL / Verilog for a living and was wondering if I should contribute, but I'm not interested in carrying the whole thing myself.

    If this projects manages to get a framebuffer device up and running within 5 years I'll be impressed. I think the whole project is incredibly naive, and doesn't understand the scale of the project they're trying to do