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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."

6 of 262 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting, But... by BiggestPOS · · Score: 0, Redundant

    But does it take a beowulf cluster of these play GLQUake?

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    What, me worry?
  2. Re:$1500 video card! by merreborn · · Score: 0, Redundant

    They're probably going to own 100% of the high-price videocard market with that.
    People buy high-end GPUs for performance. I doubt this thing even performs comparably to a $100-$200 card from a major manufacturer.

    They're going to own 100% of the "people with disposable income who're interested in FPGA hacking" market.
  3. No open FPGA tools, though... by geekgirlandrea · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I've got a 12-processor Sun E4500 that I want to put some graphics boards in and use as a workstation, and I've been having an annoying time finding anything that fits in a PCI slot, has proper open source drivers, and has dual DVI-D outputs. The closest I seem to be able to get is the Matrox G550, but that can only do up to 1280x1024 for DVI-D. This looked perfect, even if I'd have to spend my free time for the next n months writing Verilog for it, until I noticed this.

    That's right, you need a closed Windows-only tool to synthesize and download logic for the FPGA. Bleh. :(

  4. the real question is... by logicassasin · · Score: 0, Redundant

    ... does it run Crysis well???

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    Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
  5. Re:why not pci-e based? by Uncle+Focker · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Because finding a motherboard with a pci slot is real hard? You do know that PCI-x is backwards compatible, right?

  6. Re:$1500 video card! by Theovon · · Score: 0, Redundant

    The 3S4000 is the SECOND LARGEST of the Spartan 3 family. What are you talking about?