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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."

4 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. This is cool by Paul+Pierce · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Uh...not for me! by gigne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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

    --
    Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
  3. Re:$1500 video card! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    But it's not a video card:

    OGD1 is a high-end FPGA prototyping kit and hardware engineering platform, equipped with the peripherals needed to develop and test computer graphics architectures. At least it's video-card-specific, right?

    Because of the generalized nature of its core, OGD1 is very versatile and can be used for a wide variety of purposes requiring a large FPGA, PCI, fast memory, and user I/O. Whatever, as long as it kicks butt at Doom3 -- it *is* built for gamers, right?

    It is designed to be used by students learning FPGA programming, engineers needing a development platform or product base, hobbyists that want to hack their own hardware designs, users who want to the benefits of open hardware, and users who need custom peripheral devices. Damn! It's like the whole slashdot summary was not only wrong, but completely misleading! I had to go all the way to the first paragraph of the first question of their FAQ to find out the hidden truth.
  4. 100 replies and nobody's mentioned Project VGA yet by Ant+P. · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This sounds way more practical than the OpenGraphics thing. $1500 on top of having to find a PCI-X board? No thanks.