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Open Source Graphics Card Available For Advance Orders
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."
Since I'm a programmer, not a HW guy, what does these chips get me, the equivalent of a Voodoo3? I mean, dual DVI and stuff, very good and all, it doesn't sound like they have any real software base to put w/ those cards yet, so that sounds like a lot of very low-level programming. Sounds like it will be a while before anything is written for the hardware, hell it sounds like it might be a while before you get any actual hardware!
Nowhere near 100%, I think that market is pretty well covered by tri/quad-SLI to push the very last frames out of the games that benefit. The kilowatt PSU and other goodies required means it'll surely cost you more than 1500$...
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And then have it run Linux (or some other free OS)? I think that'd be pretty neat.
Having recently taken a graduate class where I had to write my own shaders for OpenGL, it was neat to play with the video card on that level; however most cards are quite limited with what is open API.
This card, while too expensive for me, might spur some interesting projects - cypto stuff and Ray tracing come to mind. I hope someone does something great with this.
This card isn't particularly useful on its own, but if you want to write graphics card drivers - It sounds like the bees knees. You don't have to go out and buy 10 different cards, cause you can just emulate the suckers on the FPGA - write and verify your driver and move on.
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Well the original Doom (and engines like Chocolate Doom...) have a hard-coded 30fps limit.
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.
If graphics programming was my thing, I so would get one. I am considering getting one regardless, if only to use it for ray tracing.
Flexible hardware + Good open source ideals = excellent product
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I don't have the kind of cash they're asking for, for a graphics specific FPGA. If they could tailor the board towards the FGPA market in general, I'm sure they'd find people interested in more than just it's rendering capability (me!!).
:D). If the card can do offline rendering efficiently enough to experiment with discrete pipelines (more gates = more fp precision!) I'd be a happy graphics geek.
I'm concerned about the shelf-life after I'm done tinkering.
I'd like an I2C bus, a few led connectors, and some magic so that I can connect a general purpose daughter board the FPGA's address bus (ie: implement USB, LAN, audio support that way). Every FPGA should be able to run as a Tanenbaum CPU by law!
As far as rendering goes I can't see an FPGA being as fast as an ASIC - propagation delay is going to hammer it, and syncing will be a bitch - but I'm still interested in what it can do offline (assuming I can get a vesa console
Good luck!
Matt
I'd love to see a graphics processor that could be programmed to create graphics that look like classical hand-drawn animation. I think you'd need to do some curve-fitting in X,Y,Z and T in order to achieve that. We all know there are cel-shaders and vector renderers that can render 2D stills that look authentic, but that's still a far cry from animating something that looks like a Disney classic, or like anime. Fitting 3D polys in X, Y, Z into curves in X and Y may be trivial, but figuring out how to turn data from X, Y, Z, T into X, Y, T is the real challenge for non-photorealistic cartoon rendering.
This sounds way more practical than the OpenGraphics thing. $1500 on top of having to find a PCI-X board? No thanks.
It also assumes we'll be able to find and keep top engineers on staff, and not lose them to a higher paid, higher profile job with NVidia.
As if that weren't enough of a deterrent, what's the target market for this graphics card ? Clearly not the high end gamers, nor the professional rendering crowd. What, you want to market an open-source graphics card to Linux users ? A community that is built on the philosophy of making the most of older hardware... they're not going to pay anywhere near enough money to make this product worthwhile.
From an ideological standpoint, open-source anything is a great idea, but reality is hardly ever ideal.
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Do you really think this graphics card is even a graphics card? The producers don't seem to think so. They describe it as "an FPGA development platform." They go on to say that it is sold as a "blank," and is "preprogrammed only with basic diagnostic logic." Does it even have drivers?
Is it really a graphics card, or is it something that might possibly become one with the right FPGA programming.
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The project seems to be on a longer-term scale than you seem to be imagining. Also, reverse-engineering CUDA is rewarding bad behavior on the part of NVIDIA.
:)
Sure, hardware requires actual money, and that makes it harder to do in an open way than software. What's wrong with trying? What's wrong with experimentation? You don't know it's not possible until it doesn't work---and even then, that still doesn't fully prove that it isn't possible.
Certainly you do hope that they succeed, don't you? Otherwise, what is your hidden agenda? Do you work at NVIDIA?