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Graphics Software Hardware Linux

Free Software Friendly Graphics Card? 578

Posted by CowboyNeal from the open-everything dept.
An anonymous reader writes "There's an interesting discussion on KernelTrap with a hardware company that is talking about developing a 'free software friendly' graphics card. The idea is to fully disclose and document all register interfaces including the BIOS, providing Linux and BSD users with a fully supported video card. The hardware engineer proposing the idea summarizes his viewpoint saying, 'the whole issue comes down to this: This is technically feasible. Should we do it?'"
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Free Software Friendly Graphics Card? More

Free Software Friendly Graphics Card?

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  • Secrets (Score:4, Insightful)

    by erick99 ( 743982 ) <homerun@gmail.com> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @10:58PM (#10594744)
    Does your company have to divulge any proprietary secrets in order to leave everything open for this card? If so, is that okay or does that do them harm?

    • Re:Secrets (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Gentlewhisper ( 759800 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:43PM (#10595002)
      Which really brings to the other point.. how advanced (or backward) will the design of this card be based on?

      Let's look at the big boys, nVidia and ATi, apart from both corporations having a lower case letter where it doesn't really belong, both companies are pretty much at the leading edge in terms of chip design/driver optimisations.

      Which is pretty much why they choose to release close sourced only drivers.

      This new company... well, R&D is going to be expensive if you are thinking of making the next Geforce or Radeon, so what are they planning to make?

      The S3 Trios of yesterday?

      If that's what they are gonna make, what about profit margins? ATi and nVidia are doing so well converting lumps of silicon into gold because their chips are fast. A graphics card by itself is not expensive at all.

      Doesn't sound like they are having a very viable business plan to me :(

      • Re:Secrets (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:07AM (#10595141)
        This new company

        Is actually an existing company with previous experience with graphics hardware and systems software. Developing a graphics card is something they are fully capable of doing. The question is whether or not they are going to make a card that targets the open source OS market.

        ATi and nVidia are doing so well converting lumps of silicon into gold because their chips are fast

        For people who want to run Doom3. I for one would like to give someone my money for a card with nice solid vendor supported 3D accel on Linx/Xorg without spending a hefty bundle. Or recompiling between reboots (I run multiple kernels).

        Not saying that this is a viable plan, but your analysis is off

      • Re:Secrets (Score:4, Informative)

        by runderwo ( 609077 ) * <runderwoNO@SPAMmail.win.org> on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:31AM (#10595251)
        They could start by examining the Rendition pipeline and functional units. The documentation for the chip is available on the web, google for v2200spec.pdf. A MIPS-like RISC core surrounded by peripherals for the heavy graphics lifting looks like the design everyone else has gone with since then.

      • Re:Secrets (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jwr ( 20994 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:06AM (#10595707) Homepage
        It doesn't follow. I don't see why the drivers need to be secret if really most (if not all) of the alleged intellectual property is in the hardware.

        IMHO this is a misconception taken for granted, because everyone is repeating it.

        • Re:Secrets (Score:5, Informative)

          by Crudely_Indecent ( 739699 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:23AM (#10595759) Journal
          the problem is that once you build hardware, the patent law says that your competitors can't make an exact copy of it. The card you have is no longer "Secret IP" once it's on a storeshelf. Your competitor spends $299 and has a reference board. The card he builds can't be exactly like yours, but he can take good ideas from your board and implement them as long as there isn't a patent against it.

          The reason they've got such tight reigns on drivers is that drivers cost a lot of programming hours to write. That is source code that I don't think the world will see. The games released for specific video cards also have some of that driver code (provided to them via NDA) from the cardmaker. their complete source code may contain very secret IP such as chip limitations, workarounds, extra settings, and other things that they may not want their competitors and customers to know about.

    • Re:Secrets (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bilestoad ( 60385 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:55PM (#10595070)
      A better question - who will buy it? I can only see one kind of customer:

      - the person who only cares about "good enough", not "awesome" performance -
      Because you're not going to equal ATI or Nvidia's offerings. The newest games will run much faster with the latest proprietary solutions. And we're headed for another revolution in gaming cards if you hadn't been following along, the return of SLI using PCI-E and multiple relatively cheap graphics cards. You can't keep up with product cycles by seeing what's out there now and expecting to bring out the same in 6 months or so.

      - and who doesn't expect it to be cheaper than mainstream offerings -
      You can't beat manufacturers who produce in huge volume in countries with low labor cost. It just can't be done, not even if your R&D all comes free from the community. Volume gets you discounts, sometimes spectacular discounts. It also gets you priority when parts allocations are made. Samsung (and distributors) won't really take much notice if you only want 10,000 3ns BGA memory parts but when PowerColor and Hercules ask for 10,000,000 that's another story.

      - and who really really cares about the idealogical and hacky side of computing -
      Here's your only point of differentiation - your entire value proposition, in a nutshell. It's not produced by "big, evil company X" and all the registers are open. Well sadly that's a smallish market.

      In short the whole project would be a charity. A bunch of people would have to do a lot of non-trivial work which they could be financially well rewarded for were they to do it for any of a number of commercial enterprizes.

      Which is fine if you can afford to do it...

      • Re:Secrets (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Spyffe ( 32976 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:45AM (#10595333) Homepage
        I disagree. I think that, properly implemented, this card could provide new and useful functionality:
        1. it could provide accelerated implementations of functions that are specific to open systems (X11 acceleration, full integration with Xrender, etc).,
        2. it could provide sophisticated multi-client functionality, for example handling clipping rectangles in hardware in cooperation with the window manager, and
        3. it could provide a complete, hardware-level programmable interface for coders, in the style of the PlayStation2's Vector Units.

        • Re:Secrets (Score:4, Informative)

          by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:21AM (#10595753)
          The problem is you are talking about tough shit to do. It could provide complete hardware programability. Yes, it could, nVidia and ATi's latest offerings do. They, however, were produced by a large team of people with lots of experience doing this, working full time, with a MASSIVE amount of equipment and money to do it.

          Designing a chip isn't trivial, even when it's a simple chip. Designing a chip that can pull of all sorts of cool, latest-greatest stuff is an art, one that very few companies are good at.

          There are also lots of things that look good on paper but just don't work out. Look at BitBoys and the Elbrus E2K. Both were the "gonna blow the competition away" kind of things, and in both cases, they had simulations in VHDL. Ya well, just because you can get something in Verilog, doesn't mean you can actually fabricate it in silicon and make it work. Neither could do it, and both failed.

          Also nothing you are talking about is new. As I meantioned, programable GPUs are here, all DX9 GPUs are fully programable (turing complete), and all DX8 ones are programable. They have all they capabilities they need to do hardware acceletation of things like clipping in window managers, there just hasn't been the window manager that uses it (on a PC). Longhorn is going to fully (allegedly), and OS-X already does use the GPU for it's WM, to a fair degree. As for X11 acceleration, install nVidia's X drivers. There's your acceleration, it's all kinds of fast (there are other drivers like that too).

          I'm not saying an open archecture has no uses, but an expensive open 2d-only card has just about no use.

    • Re:Secrets (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Instead of using internal company IP, just mass produce this card: http://www.opencores.org/projects.cgi/web/vga_lcd/ overview [opencores.org]

      Its free, and I'm sure that the designer wouldn't mind the fame. The company could probably also pay him for improvements and optimizations.

  • Patents (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21, 2004 @10:59PM (#10594757)
    Can it be cool and still be royalty-free? Or are you going to get shut down by the big boys for stepping in their patents?

  • How about a Free Software Friendly Audio Card? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by JiffyJeff ( 693994 ) * on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:00PM (#10594762)
    How about a Free Software Friendly Audio Card to go along with it?

    I don't know about others, but I've had *way* more trouble getting audio to work on my linux boxes than I've ever had configuring video.

  • Heh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:00PM (#10594764)
    What? Create a functional and supportable video card that is platform agnostic and will just work? The problem is, it is too logical. Unfortunately, it won't work in todays economic environment. Unless you are screwing over your competitors, your customers, or your employees, you can't make a buck.

    • Re:Heh (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Zeio ( 325157 )
      I know a compiler guy working at nvidia (In Santa Clara on San Thomas Expressway right down the road from me) and an ASIC design guy (who worked for HP and for Qualcomm before) who works at ATI in Marlborough Massachusetts.

      Both enjoy work. So the employees, as far as I can tell, don't get "screwed." Tele-commuting, flex, high pay, great benefits. Yeah, that sounds "screwed."

      And I have several Unixen running quite well with ATI cards, so I don't see any screwed customers. Linux, Mac, Windows and FreeBSD se

  • Neat idea (Score:5, Informative)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@gmaYEATSil.com minus poet> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:00PM (#10594765) Homepage Journal
    I like the idea. My only thought is, are they going to have enough pull to make this happen? Graphics cards are much more than just throwing a few hundred million transistors on a chip. You have to worry about pipeline architecture, parallel texturing units, and (most importantly) well optimized driver software.

    Can this company create a card that's competitive? And if they can, will they get pushed out of business through patent litigation?

  • Nvidia/ATI (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pmazer ( 813537 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:01PM (#10594767)
    They may have the best drivers for their card in two years, but I don't see how they can compete with Nvidia/ATI even with opensource drivers

    • Re:Nvidia/ATI (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MC Negro ( 780194 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:09PM (#10594818) Journal
      They may have the best drivers for their card in two years, but I don't see how they can compete with Nvidia/ATI even with opensource drivers
      I imagine it comes down to niche-market success rather than direct competition with ATI or Nvidia. I can't imagine any startup business scratching the surface of either companies' market dominance. However, they certainly have potential to be quite successful among the Linux/*BSD crowd if they are this open about their hardware and drivers. Think about it. Think about 1% of the global desktop PC market (or whatever the number is now) buying the video card because of 100% X11 compatibility and open source drivers. While it probably won't generate enough revenue to even cover to operating cost of ATI or NVIDIA, it certainly has potential to make a few people very successful and/or wealthy.

    • Re:Nvidia/ATI (Score:4, Informative)

      by theparanoidcynic ( 705438 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:10PM (#10594827)
      With comercial games being ported to Linux, marginal closed-source drivers which the kernel folks are (rightly IMHO) hostile to, and a growing Linux market share they may do pretty well. If they actually pull this off I know that I'd buy it.

    • #3 might be an option (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bstadil ( 7110 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:23PM (#10594892) Homepage
      Why not contact the number 3 player in the market and see if they are game for going open source.

      What are Matrox and VIA doing these days?

      • I'll never buy Matrox again (Score:5, Informative)

        by Svenne ( 117693 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:33AM (#10595570) Homepage
        Matrox? Don't count on it. They've just "recently" gone from being one of the best supported video card makers, both 2D and 3D, in linux, to one of the absolut worst after they switched to a closed source model of providing their own drivers.

        "Worst?", I hear you say, "How can that be? My ATI doesn't work great either!". Well, consider this; It's been almost a year [matrox.com] since their last driver was released. It doesn't support Linux 2.6 [matrox.com] yet. People are trying to patch [matrox.com] things [matrox.com] up [matrox.com], but it's a losing battle. It doesn't support SMP [matrox.com] either, which means that any P4/HT users are out of luck. And I'm not just talking about not actively enhancing the drivers for SMP, no, it will outright crash and bring the the whole computer down with it if you som much as think of starting an OpenGL application. Oh, and while we're at it, there is of course no support at all [matrox.com] for AMD64.

        Quite frankly, Matrox has remained so apathetic to the Linux crowd that I'm now convinced that they tricked us all just to get our money, and deep down inside they just hate us.
        • Matrox is kinda a non-option to me (I like my games), but this sounds out-right silly.

          a) Matrox don't have any major-league proprietary drivers. Their strength is 2D, which isn't exactly rocket science.
          b) Most people (at least not on slashdot) don't see Linux as a gaming OS. A "serious" desktop? Certainly way more likely than as a gaming PC.

          In short, Matrox seems to be alienating a group that seems well aligned with their overall strategy (the 2D market). A strange move, if you ask me.

          Kjella
      • Awhile back, Via released the specs to the CLE266 chipset [sourceforge.net], which is an on motherboard graphics chipset most commonly used on their mini-itx boards. They have also bought S3. A few months ago S3 released the DeltaChrome S4 and S8 in Europe and Asia, no North American release yet. They have claimed they are going to release open source linux drivers for the card at some point in the near future. The price point for the performance they are offering would be just about right with open drivers. Also they a

  • Is this... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gustgr ( 695173 ) <gustgr@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:01PM (#10594769)
    open hardware? free [as in free speech not as in free beer] hardware?

  • (Age old...) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xanadu-xtroot.com ( 450073 ) <xanaduNO@SPAMinorbit.com> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:02PM (#10594772) Homepage Journal
    SHOULD we do it?

    Yes.

    WILL they do it?

    No.

    ~~~~~~

    It's a "trade secret thing. nVidia doesn't want ATI to know what they are planing / doing so they can make their buck... /etc. ,BR>

  • Free graphics cards? (Score:4, Funny)

    by stevok ( 818024 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:03PM (#10594775)
    I'm in!

  • not _economically_ feasable (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:04PM (#10594780)
    I think it's very unlikely that anyone starting from scratch will be able to compete with nVidia or ATi on performance, and there aren't all that many geeks who care about hardware openness enough to give up the value.

    So, I predict that it will be expensive and low-volume, and (sadly) will eventually fail.

    • I disagree (Score:4, Informative)

      by DaveAtFraud ( 460127 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:39PM (#10594972) Homepage Journal
      Having not only RTFAed, I also clicked through the link to where the guy who posted it works. His employer already markets PCI based graphics cards for Sun and government customers. Turning some of the counter arguments on their head, this would be a cheap way for his employer [techsource.com] to open up the x86 Linux market at minimal cost.

      Just a reminder, drivers are a cost for video card manufacturers. They sell a card and have to bury the cost of driver development and maintenance into the cost of the card. Open sourcing driver development lets a card manufacturer profit from the hardware while the community develops drivers for them and they get good karma to boot. This would be a fairly inexpensive/low risk way for a low-end (PCI only it appears at the moment) card manufacturer to get their "foot in the door".

      Only the "big boys" (Nvidia and ATI) have anything to lose by open sourcing their cards. People would actually see to what extent they fudge their cards and drivers for benchmarks.

      • Re:I disagree (Score:3, Informative)

        by mrchaotica ( 681592 )
        Oh, sorry; I didn't RTFA (what do you expect; it's Slashdot!) and I thought they were a new company starting from scratch. If they already have a card and it's just about releasing documentation, it's a whole different story.

  • I think this would be a great thing, (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:06PM (#10594791)
    both for the company that does it and the linux community. The company that does it will immediately have all the people building linux boxes flocking to them-- the people building games machines will still go with whatever's fastest, but people who just want everything to work will be happy to know that at least with this one card, they'll never have to wait for drivers when the kernel changes, never have to worry about a buggy video driver, their system will just be that much more solid. So that's a nice little boost in sales. Maybe not a huge boost, but compared to the amount of work involved in opening the specs up, it's a great cost/benefit sort of thing.

    It would also be fantastic for the linux community because the existence of such a card-- and the preferential treatment the card would receive-- would put pressure on all the other cardmakers to follow suit, or at least tighten up their linux support.

  • Unlikely (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ryanmfw ( 774163 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:06PM (#10594793)
    It's serving a small market(right now), requires thousands of man hours of design and testing, requires expensive fabrication equipment(too expensive for this company probably), and is unnecessary because current video cards work fine under Linux. At least well enough that spending $500 to buy a mediocre card by a small company is out of the question. And yes, it would most likely cost that much. With little demand, high development costs and high fabrication costs, it will be that expensive.

    • Re:Unlikely (Score:3, Informative)

      by I am the Bullgod ( 797123 )
      I agree that the development costs would probably high and that this card would likely not be very competitive price/performance wise. However, you're overstating the capital investment required to actually "fabricate" the product. You can't throw a stone without hitting a contract printed circuit board manufacturer these days. In other words, you can throw a bill of materials and circuit board layout at them and have the board manufactured, packaged, and drop shipped to your customer without ever touching

  • " Should we do it?" - Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Man in Spandex ( 775950 ) <prsn DOT kev AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:07PM (#10594806)
    Until now, open source software has proven to be able to scare M$. Why can't open source hardware scare competitors of it's field? Obviously it's not the same but hopefully, if they all planned it well, and by the article it shows that they got a nice idea, I'm sure a project such as this would get sufficent support to progress.
    • Well, although it would be great if the big graphics vendors (ATI, nVidia, etc..) worked together to make OSS video boards, it really seems very unlikely considering there's some competition in the market.

      Unlike Microsoft, where there really isn't any, the ATI and nVidia rivalry is keeping things moving at an acceptable pace - just as the AMD and Intel rivalry has raised the bar in x86 performance.

      We need Linux to be free of OS lock-in and to get out from under Microsoft. We don't really NEED a free and
      • >> We need Linux to be free of OS lock-in and to get out from under Microsoft. We don't really NEED a free and open video board, when there's competition in the market and the vendors follow what standards exist.

        You haven't tried to run ATI cards in 3D games under Linux, have you?

        There are plenty of 3D games with Linux support I'd love to play, but I am at the mercy of terrible ATI drivers.

        If nVidia were to let their drivers for non-MS platforms slide, then there wouldn't be any good options.

  • 2D only... (Score:3, Informative)

    by mfago ( 514801 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:10PM (#10594824)
    For those who didn't RTFA, the guy is talking about an FPGA, not an ASIC. Reasonable 3D is a pipe dream. OTOH, everything would be open spec: BIOS, card layout, and everything. As an FPGA it would be completely reprogramable.

    I think it'd be great to hack around on, but considering the price of perhaps $100 I don't see this selling in quantity.

  • why not just lobby nvidia? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trailer Trash ( 60756 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:10PM (#10594829) Homepage
    Seriously. nVidia already has kick-ass hardware and the best drivers available under Linux, plus one of the best, if not the best, installer for Linux that I've ever used. It would probably take less effort to convince them to open up completely than to create a new card.

    • Re:why not just lobby nvidia? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bofkentucky ( 555107 ) <bofkentucky&gmail,com> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:24PM (#10594894) Homepage Journal
      They can't though, supposedly they have other people's trade secret IP in the code, until they can do a clean room rewrite of that code, it's off limits.

      As it stands, they aren't making enough money off of F/OSS users to pay for a buyout of the IP in question, pay for the lawsuit if they broke the license agreement, or clean room re-write the code. If any of those 3 conditions are met, they should be able to turn a profit on selling cards to Linux/*BSD users.

    • Re:why not just lobby nvidia? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Noksagt ( 69097 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:24PM (#10594897) Homepage
      Because they won't listen until you can convince them that any marketshare they'll gain on linux boxes makes up for the possible loss of users on other OSs because ATI and others will be able to learn their secrets & make better cards.

      • Re:why not just lobby nvidia? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:46PM (#10595025)
        Something I never understood is why Nvidia couldn't just provide a straight dump of the register specs. None of the ultra 'leet stuff that must be in their drivers mind you. Just a list of ports, registers, memory ranges...you know the stuff you need to develop your own driver. It would probably take a couple years to even get in the same ballpark as Nvidia's binary drivers but at least their cards wouldn't become next to useless on other arches.
        • Probably because it would reveal future possibilities, like "undocumented" features in many places and such. Stuff that is disabled in drivers, because they either don't work right or work well. If you have a register in the middle of a block of used commands that says "Reserved for future use" the BS alert would go off instantly.

          Kjella

    • Re:why not just lobby nvidia? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ender81b ( 520454 ) <wdinger@@@gmail...com> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:37PM (#10594965) Homepage Journal
      How about the kernel guys make a stable driver API and then we wouldn't have to worry about this type of crap? It's ridiculous that people complain about lack of driver support but then give the Hardware people a never-ending totally unstable API for drivers.

      • Re:why not just lobby nvidia? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dmaxwell ( 43234 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:52PM (#10595056)
        A "totally stable driver api" locks you into supporting hack on top of cruft on top of hack. You might find something that badly needs redesigning and won't be able to touch it because it will break the driver of some four year old piece of hardware. It will also force even more contortions onto the other arches. Linux runs on more than x86. What you really mean is an x86 driver api.

        Remember that leak of Windows 2000 source? Something like 16% of it was application specific kludges. Many of the apps weren't even MS'. This isn't the sort of developer stability we need.

        Also, many applications require more than technical excellence. They require trust. I don't trust the provider of a binary only driver to support my equipment 5 years down the road.

  • Put your money where your mouth is... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jafo ( 11982 ) * on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:15PM (#10594853) Homepage
    One of the best ways to tell a company that they should go ahead with a product, is to put your money where your mouth is, as they say.

    I'd be willing to pre-order a graphics card that fully documented it's specs and cooperated with the Linux community for my desktop. The problem is that many companies aren't prepared for such a thing, and don't have a way to take your money. So, helps us out... Where do we pre-buy one?

    Sean

  • Yes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ChiralSoftware ( 743411 ) <info@chiralsoftware.net> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:21PM (#10594884) Homepage
    I hate buying hardware for my PC because if I get the wrong thing, it can be a nightmare to get it working properly. If there's something that's in some way Linux-approved, Linux-certified or just Linux-friendly, I'll always buy it. Even if it costs me $100 more, I'll buy it. I have spent DAYS messing around with a printer, or a card of some kind, trying to get it working properly under Linux. It's not worth it. I'll pay extra to know that I won't have any hassles: plug it in, it works. I have hardware sitting around that I'm going to try when Suse 9.2 comes out, but that isn't working now. It's terrible. Currently I use Nvidia cards but that isn't a good solution either; I have to spend half an hour messing around to get it to work. I would rather just buy the card that is supported 100% during the plain old installation. The only way that can happen is with a fully open specification.

    So please do it. I know some Linux users take pride in their amazing ability to get some piece of not-really-supported hardware to function, and in fact there are whole companies which provide installation of Linux on unsupported laptops as their business, but this is not fun and is a waste of time.

    When can I buy it?

    • Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)

      by computerme ( 655703 )
      > I'll always buy it. Even if it costs me $100 more

      You might. Most Open Software users would not.

      Period.

  • Missing the point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by azmaveth ( 302274 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:23PM (#10594891) Homepage
    Seems that most people here didn't bother to read the article. (Big surprise.)

    This is a 2D only card. He would not try to compete with BigBadVideoCardVendor. He knows that development of a competitive 3D card is out of the question for now. But you have to start somewhere.

    Unlike an opensource software project, an "opensource" hardware project can't "show me the code" in order to gain legitimacy and gather developer attention. He's looking to see if there is real interest so that he can make a case to his boss. He seems to understand the risks involved, and I hope he can make it work.

    • Re:Missing the point (Score:3, Informative)

      by dmaxwell ( 43234 )
      How would this card be better than what we can buy off the shelf then? Even Nvidia cards can provide a 2D desktop from the opensource drivers. Adequate 2D only can be had for 5 bucks from the local used shop bin. This card would have to provide at least rudimentary 3D on the level of a cheezy laptop chipset to even be worth talking about.

    • In that case (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 )
      My answer is an unqualified "No, do not go forward, there is no market." The market for 2d cards is totally dead not because people don't use systems just for 2d work, but because there are so many that can be gotten very cheaply, and driver support for all platforms is great. I can easily get a 2d card that is fully supported under Windows, Linux, BSD, BeOS, etc, etc. It's getting a 3d card that is likewise supported.

      So I don't see any gain here, espically since it's likely to be more expensive. You aren'

    • Re:Missing the point (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nels_tomlinson ( 106413 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:06AM (#10595134) Homepage
      I only use Linux, so I only buy hardware that works with Linux. If it doesn't work with Linux, it's just a paperweight.

      I don't do games, and I have no use for 3D. A nice 2D card that was endorsed by the kernel and X gurus (something like ``this company is doing everything we ask to make sure we can use their hardware'') would be an easy sale to me, as long as it didn't cost much more than the low-end NVidia.

      If it would do dual-head, and drive a couple of 21 inch monitors at 1600 x 1200 with 32bit color, it could cost way more than the low-end Nvidia and be a great deal.

      I'll be in the market for some new hardware about the time they could get this out, too. I'll be keeping my eyes open.

    • Re:Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Trogre ( 513942 )
      No 3D? In that case this card is going to be completely useless for most users.

      With just about every decent game and the new Xorg extensions both requiring accelerated openGL, and the fact that most motherboards have some kind of video controller on board, these cards will only be of interest to a very very small group.

      Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they shouldn't go ahead and make this card, I'm just saying they'd better not expect anyone to actually buy them. It might be a good starting point for

      • Yes and no, actually (Score:3, Informative)

        by Moraelin ( 679338 )
        You'd be surprised how much of a market does exist for computers which aren't a l33t 3D gaming machine. Think: corporate market.

        For example, there are more servers sold with an ancient 2D ATI Rage graphics chip on-board, than gaming machines with a GeForce 6800 Ultra. Or, heck, until very recently Sun still sold workstations with a renamed ATI Rage PCI card in them.

        The problem however is that

        1. that's a bulk low-profit margin market. It's not about selling marked up boxed graphics card, it's about sellin

  • Possibly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:28PM (#10594918) Homepage
    If there is a market for such a card, it should be low end, as cheap as possible.

    You will never compete with ATI/nVidia, and they are ignoring the low-end ($40) market. Other low-end manufacturers (S3, I'm looking at you) have absymal Linux support.

    Forget about 3D. The number of people who 1. use 3D on Linux, and 2. don't buy the latest ATI/nVidia, is too small.

    Cater to large-scale specialty installs, multi-head installs in schools, etc.

  • Hell ya. I want G-DOS. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:29PM (#10594921)

    That would rock the house considurably.

    GRAPHIC MANUFACTURERS SELL GRAPHICS CARDS, NOT DRIVERS.

    Open source drivers are a great inducement to purchase a card.

    Even if the card is slower then others and slightly more expensive, I would still buy it. If it's very much slower and very much more expensive then it would be a issue.

    Ok what I am about to say will only make sense is you understand what ISA's are.

    Get out of your mind the ISA slot and the x86 ISA is teh suck. PowerPC has a ISA, for example.

    It's a standard way on which software is ment to interact with hardware in your computer.

    For example you first created the 386. Most of what the software ran on was raw hardware. However the modern pentium4's and Althons are VERY much DRASTICLY different from the original 386 cpu.

    Lots more REAL registers. Lots of extensions, SSE, MMX, so on and so forth.

    Why then are they able to run programs and even DOS OSes designed from the i386?

    BECAUSE THE ABSTRACTION NEEDED TO FIT INTO THE ISA STANDARDS IS BUILT INTO THE HARDWARE.

    So what we need for video cards is a ISA for them. Like the VESA standards, but for hardware 3d acceleration.

    Something built around OpenGL, because it's open standards and universally accepted, unlike DirectX which is NOT just for 3-d but for input, sound and all sorts of other stuff and is only specific to one vendor operating on only one platform.

    Think about it.

    Video cards are mini miniture computers.
    They have a micro proccessor.
    They have RAM.
    They have a BIOS.
    So on and so forth.

    So why not build the drivers for the video cards like you build a OS?

    And why not build a opensource OS for it built around a Open ISA standard for OpenGL capable video cards?

    Maybe a GDOS? Graphical Driver OS?

    That way you have a choice. You have a generic OpenGL capable drivers that will run only any compatable video card irregardless of make or model. The GDOS would be something exceedingly simple. It only has one purpose, take care of OpenGL instructions from software running on it's Parent OS and transform it into instructions to be ran on the hardware itself.

    Then people like Nvidia and ATI could take that Free G-DOS and add extensions to it for their own private optimized rendering stuff that sits outside the normal OpenGL standards. Propriatory ways of rendering Anti-Aliased text for example.

    If they don't want to release their secrets to propriatory bits of software they dont' have to.

    But if you don't want to run the propriatory software you still have full standards-compliant OpenGL drivers. If they are a bit slower, then so what? I'd rather have slightly slower Open source, open standards, drivers then slightly faster closed source drivers anyday.

    I care more about the stability of my system then anything else.

    Then when the OpenGL standards are upgraded, or you need a new generation of ISA to get rid of the cruft it would be simple, since you only dealing with a single-tasking, single-purpose, specialized peice of hardware. Backware compatability would be taken care of by allowing older cards to render in Software (Mesa) the bits that they can't render in hardware due to their oldness.

    The OS would be kept independant of it. The kernel would be kept out of it. The G-DOS could be in it's own memory space or even in userspace (since with displays your only dealing with one user at a time)

    G-DOS 1.0 cards
    G-DOS 2.0 cards
    So on and so forth. With in this framework their would be very much room for performance growth. It would reduce User's suffering, increase stability, and increase ease of debugging and testing.

    And if some companies don't want to join in with the standards, along with everybody else. Then dinosaurs realy do go instinct, you know. But I don't see that happening. After all companies like ATI and Nvidia already do belong to open standards groups like OpenGL.

  • RTFA! please (Score:5, Informative)

    by Svet-Am ( 413146 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:32PM (#10594938) Homepage
    for those of us that read the article, we see that the entire nVidia/ATi argument is practically moot. the developer explicity says that the card will be primarily 2D because his employer won't give enough funding to produce an ASIC. Thus, they're using an FPGA and will only really be able to implement a 2D core.

  • How about (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BCW2 ( 168187 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:36PM (#10594958) Journal
    A nice useful mid range card at a competitive price. I'll take 2, To start with and more later. We are starting to sell dual boot systems at the white box store where I'm a tech and sales type. We have sold a few in the last 2 months, some Fedora, some Suse, and one Mandrake. A nice mid-range card supported on Linux and Win XP would be perfect. Just make it a bit cheaper than the Radeon 9600, with similar performance and I'll be able to sell the hell out of them. One of the biggest complaints amongst Linux users is support for video and audio.

  • Feasability... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by supabeast! ( 84658 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:39PM (#10594976)
    It may be technically feasible, but what about financially? The interesting thing about open-source consumers is that they're mostly talk, but when it comes down to actually buying all of they stuff that they claim to want for Linux, they don't vote with their dollars. Just look at the failure of Lokigames to make a profit, not to mention id's big profile attempt to push Linux by doing a simultaneous Linux/Mac/Windows release of Quake III - sales of Linux Quake III were abysmal.

    Expecting geeks to pony up a few hundred bucks for an open-source video card that has little if any chance of competing with ATI/Nvidia on speed seems pretty unlikely.

  • Linux/BSD focus misses the true potential (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LightStruk ( 228264 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:44PM (#10595006)
    An open, documented piece of graphics hardware has tremendous commercial potential, and would see considerable use in price-sensitive markets. Such a design would succeed not because geeks buy FPGAs and burn the design onto it, but rather because chipset vendors and embedded systems designers could simply use the "open, standard" video card implementation and avoid reinventing the wheel.

    Once the 2D core has been proven commercially, the companies that use it will be interested in adding features such as 3D acceleration. Then we'll see the combination of volunteer and professional collaboration we're so familiar with in the F/OSS world.

  • Naming (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LittleLebowskiUrbanA ( 619114 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:45PM (#10595017) Homepage Journal
    Please come up with something original not "FreeGeForce" or "OpenRadeon."

  • Laptops (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Markus Registrada ( 642224 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:51PM (#10595049)
    It really should be something that laptop vendors can use.

    What I would rather see, instead of a card, particularly, would be a design for a generic register interface that any vendor can implement. Each vendor can provide as much optimization as their market will bear. The creator of the spec would have first-mover advantage, but eventually everybody would have to support it (in addition to whatever else they had). Then, any new laptop would work with at least the generic driver. I know VESA was an attempt at something similar, but it was at the wrong level and too weenie.

    Maybe there is already an interface in use in some "obsolete" card that could be lifted wholesale, and then cleaned up and modernized. It seems a suitable subject for an ECMA standard.

  • TV Out (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gadzinka ( 256729 ) <rrw@hell.pl> on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:53PM (#10595062) Journal
    While we're at it, they could throw in decent tvout to this card. Just a simple framebuffer with ability to sync to vert refresh, double/triple buffering. And independent from main display. It doesn't even has to have backend scaller, processors are fast enough to scale DivX to 720x576 in real time.

    Hell, I would pay up to $50 for a simple PCI card with low resolution (enough for PAL/NTSC), tvout, vert sync, double/triple buffering and good support in mplayer (so it means completelly open specs).

    Robert

    PS No, there are no cards on the market in the price range of up to $200 that match all those specs.

    PPS No, dxr3 doesn't count, one has to compress video to mpeg1/mpeg2 in order to play it on this card, which results in lower quality. And because of this it eats too much cpu, as well as there are constant problems with a/v sync.

  • Not that hard, IF... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mercuryresearch ( 680293 ) on Thursday October 21, 2004 @11:56PM (#10595079) Journal
    This is doable, if you're willing to compromise on not being a "complete" graphics solution, IE, not trying to implement hardware accelerated everything.

    I'd suggest simply a dumb frame buffer, and doing everything in software. Then your solution is simply a memory controller, plus a CRT controller and an output graphics DAC. Really, if you implemented a VGA controller from the early 90s sans the backware compatible bits for MDA,CGA, EGA, etc, and opened up the line/pixel resolution you'd be there.

    If you make the goals modest enough, this could probably be done with a field-programmable gate array, an external graphics DAC, and some RAM. The only tricky part is external DACs are hard to come by these days and aren't cheap. (Prior to their integration in current-era parts, they were down in the $1 range, but since they're integrated now, the only stuff that's commonly available are insanely high end workstation DACs.)

    Back in the mid-late 90s, right as 2D acceleration was hitting its peak and 3D acceleration was emerging, there were netlists of VGA designs for sale for as little as $500. So designs of this level aren't hard.

    If you're thinking even full 2D acceleration, it gets much harder. and if you're thinking 3D acceleration in an "open" project that would be competitive with even the slowest Nvidia/ATI parts... you're on drugs.

    One alternative would be to approach an existing vendor about opening up an "old" product. However, getting a fresh production run of an old product wouldn't be cheap -- you're basically talking a million to get masks made, initial wafer lots, etc. Hence the FPGA suggestion, since that's commonly available hardware that doesn't require any manufacturing specific to the design.

    However, some manufacturers may still be in low volume production with a suitable product. Someone who used to be small player in the PC graphics market years ago but isn't now would be a candidate -- perhaps a Silicon Motion or an Avance Logic (part of Realtek now, I think, though I doubt the video products are still active, tho the audio parts are) could be persuaded to open up a part that's in sustained low-volume production.

    Seriously, though, if you can't offer significant volumes -- the minimum probably being on the order of 10-20K/quarter, and that's VERY small in this business -- don't expect to get much help from existing vendors.

  • Why different hardware interfaces? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mr_zorg ( 259994 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:01AM (#10595102)
    Why do the current video card vendors feel the need to have their own custom hardware interface anyway? They all have to ultimately provide OpenGL or DirectX drivers anyway, why not just implement OpenGL or DirectX on the video card's BIOS?

    Remember back in the day when the VGA cards first came out and how you had to custom program for each video card? Then the VESA standard came out and made things much simpler. I ask again, why not do the same thing for hardware accelerated 2d and 3d cards using existing standards like OpenGL or DirectX?

    The would still protect their proprietary GPU design, while making video drivers trivially simple at the OS level as well as platform independent. Need to update the "drivers"? BIOS flash...

    Or is there some compelling reason AGAINST doing that that I'm missing?

  • I wouldn't buy it (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:03AM (#10595115) Homepage
    I currently own a couple of nvidia cards. I enjoy that NVIDIA is providing 3d accelleration for my installed software. What this Free Software Friendly board is capable of is minimal. It's essentially an ancient 2d acceleration. 3d support is off the table. I can find that elsewhere; I think there's a few OSS drivers that do that with proprietary cards. Perhaps they can't work on obscure platforms. I don't work with obscure platforms regularly, thats why they're obscure!

    From a ROI perspective, you have to convince me there's some improvement over the status quo. I couldn't care less about the source. I know that 3d graphics are among the most alien software topics to developers. Its difficult, especially when you're mixing it with low level programming in a performance sensative environment. Not providing 3d means I'll look for a second card. More likely, I'll be looking at a different card that offers more functionality, even on Linux, at 50 dollars, than this can offer at 100.

    Simply put, an free-software friendly board lacks a community to push it forward, and I don't see it treading water among the highly competitive graphics card market. If you want this to sell, you need to identify and explicitly cater to your niche market. Promote it as a learning tool, and grease the community wheels. Just putting it out there and expecting the world to recognize its value won't net you much.

  • Market, Workload, and _Patents_. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Christopher Thomas ( 11717 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:42AM (#10595318)
    I've spent a bit of time in a third-party graphics driver house, and I now do chip design, so I can speak knowledgeably about some of this. The problems are:
    • There will be next to no market, so funding is a problem.

      You won't compete performance-wise with high-end consumer 3D cards. You won't compete budget-wise with low-end consumer 3D cards. You're going to have crappy Windows drivers unless you wave money in front of your developers to work on that uninteresting part and _maintain_ it, _and_ shell out for the Microsoft developer packages for this sort of thing.

      Your revenue? Linux geeks who are patriotic enough to pay for a product with less bang for the buck than a standard commercial card, and who will take the promise of eventually-less-buggy drivers some time in the future as being more valuable than a buggy but adequate and fast 3D driver now.
    • People cost money. This is a problem.

      The thread makes mention of hardware cost control, though they're having serious trouble making that competitive (hard to beat quantity-millions for bulk rates). However, Alan Cox's message highlights a serious problem - you have a lack of programmers for cards that specs are already known for.

      The only realistic solution I can think of is to pay coders to produce a minimum adequate driver implementation for the new card (or heck, even one of the old ones). Making a decent accelerated 2D driverfor an experimental card is a few person-months of work, if memory serves. Making a decent accelerated 3D driver is a few person-years of work. The budget for this is within reason, but still has to come from somewhere. As there isn't a deeply pressing need for this being felt by most people (see previous point), the pace of volunteer development will be slow (as is shown by Alan Cox's comments about current driver projects).

      I'm not suggesting taking this outside the open source community. I'm suggesting paying open source people enough that they can do this as their day job, and have _incentive_ to do this as opposed to some other interesting project.
    • Graphics cards are in a patent minefield.

      This is the Big Problem. I can't stress it enough. Any easy way of implementing _anything_ to do with 2D graphics cards was patented a decade ago or more. Any easy way of implementing any basic 3D was patented more recently, but is still patented. Even crawling through the patent database to look for implementations that were missed will take a lot of time, and cost a significant amount of money (you need experts on graphics algorithms and VLSI design to do this, and patent lawyers to back them up; see previous point about volunteer time vs. needed schedule).

      Big graphics companies solve this by doing the requisite grunt work, and aggressively patenting everything they can think of as a defensive measure. The standard way of solving patent conflicts is bitter litigation followed by cross-licensing relevant patent portfolios from each other (we've seen this in other parts of the hardware world often enough too). A low-budget open source card project won't be able to afford either of these, and both will eventually become necesary (someone will claim you're infringing no matter how clear it is you aren't, because it's in their best interests to make the claim).

    In summary, the only way that I can see an open source graphics architecture being developed is if the community and donors scrape together several hundred thousand to a few million in startup capital to fund hardware and software development, and to deploy lawyers. A side benefit is that you might even be able to afford chip spins if you're on the high side of the funding scale, though it'd probably be more wise to divert the funds to multi-platform driver support and patent portfolio instead.

    Variant options that come to mind:

    • License existing patents instead of trying to work around them.

      The catch is th

  • What crappy comments... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @12:52AM (#10595361) Journal
    Damn, there isn't a single good comment in this whole discussion... Does anyone here realize what a huge difference a fully-open videocard would make?

    Yes, you'd have working drivers, which is valuable, but barely worth noting. The big deal will be the more advanced features.

    HDTV is developing pretty well, and even if you can't get HDTV broadcasts, there's plenty of HD material on the internet. Unfortunately, most computers aren't fast enough to play 1080 material in any format, and I'd bet there's a few that can't handle 720 video encoded with MPEG-4, WMV, etc. The real answer is to have hardware decoding... MPEG-1/2 are all that we see now, and even that is pretty rare under Linux. I happen to be lucky on that front, but xvmc doesn't allow you to deinterlace before it's displayed, so it's fairly useless at this point.

    When you have all the specs for the FPGA, you can just download the latest upgrade, and have full-fledged MPEG4/Theora/WMV decoding on the same videocard, meaning a 100MHz PC could playback HD-DVDs perfectly. No doubt Tivo would be equally as interested in the features of this card.

    Even if you don't have a videocard powerful enough to decode your favorite codec, you'll still get serious gains from it being open. If you check-out mplayer's vidix drivers, you'll see that you can get serious performance improvements if the developers have the docs for the card. It's hard to explain what a HUGE performance boost you would get from having a fully-open card.

    Plus, FPGA programming is getting a bit of attention lately. It wouldn't be hard to imagine companies setting up clusters of computers, and filling every available PCI slot with this graphics card, and using the cards to do most of the calculations. Remember the PS2 cluster? Imagine the processing power of that, but on steroids.

    In addition, think of all the groups trying to setup display-walls, with multiple monitors. Being able to do that much easier with this card could make it a big seller, if nothing else...

    As someone who has setup several Unix machines for multimedia, I think there would be a big market for this, even if it costs, say, $60, and has no 3D support. If you think you need 3D support everywhere, you're probably mistaken. If you're running anything other than x86 (or maybe MacOS on PPC) you've got practically no options for hardware-accelerated 3D anyhow. So, putting a 2D card in there, instead of wasting money on a new Radeon, makes everything work better, and you loose nothing.

    Personally, I have only 2 suggestions.

    1. Make it as cheap as possible, while still being fully functional. If it sells for $30 (maybe after a few months) I'll buy dozens of them myself!

    2. Include as many output options as you can. I use S-Video a lot, but very few have interlaced TV-output support. DVI is important for those with LCDs. Composite looks like the next standard for HDTV output, and that could turn into lots of sales (especially if your card costs less than ATI's Radeon/HDTV adapter!). I've heard lots of cards don't work with HDTV well because they can't output an interlaced signal at HDTV resolutions.

    Dual-head support would be very nice, at least if you can include dual overlay support with it. Then you only need 2 cards for a 4-head Linux system.

  • The other killer app (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mcelrath ( 8027 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:18AM (#10595495) Homepage
    The other killer app besides 3D games waiting to happen in the video sector is TV. The pcHDTV [pchdtv.com] guys have demonstrated significant demand for their linux-friendly part. Combined with MythTV [mythtv.org] many people are building TiVo-like devices which do not operate as desktop machines. Their primary purpose is recording and displaying video at the resolutions required by TV, DVD, and HDTV.

    A path that could be very fruitful is to design a video card to be used in a TiVo-like device. In particular, in addition to the good suggestions involving the Render and Damage extensions, a 2D-only card should do some hardware accelerating of IDCT and motion compensation, so that i.e. DVD's and MPEG-4 files can be played with a very minimal CPU. Work with systems integrators that are willing to put MythTV on a silent fanless system with a pcHDTV card and your video card/chip. This could be a good way to go for smaller but demonstrated market, where the part is easier to design than a 3D-nvidia-ati competing beast. Actually doing the video and TV on the same part is a good idea, if it can be done, since these machines are usually space and PCI-slot constrained.

    I do not think, out of the gate on a small budget is reasonable or feasable to get a 3D part. It would be better to start small, and plan some features for the second generation. For funding, take pre-orders. Oh and hype the shit out of it, on slashdot.

    Secondly, how feasable is it to put a cheap off-the-shelf CPU on the part to handle the 3D workload. Certainly that's faster and cheaper than a FPGA. CPU's with MMX or Altivec instructions can be had in the 1-2 GHz range for < $50.

    -- Bob

  • 80x25 text display (Score:3, Interesting)

    by baywulf ( 214371 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:40AM (#10595600)
    If you just need the 80x25 text display it is very easy to implement in hardware. I did one recently using about 1% of the resources of the FPGA. And this is something with colored text and everything. I even borrowed the font bitmap used under Linux console mode so you can't even tell the difference.

    My long term goal is it use the remaining 99% of FPGA resource to build a custom cpu and port uclinux onto it. Then add a keyboard and you have a computer on one chip.

  • Make it reliable, I'll buy... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by refactored ( 260886 ) <cyent.xnet@co@nz> on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:52AM (#10595660) Homepage Journal
    I get a deep gut rage when my Linux box that used to run for hundreds of days at a time freezes in the %$##@! Nvidia driver because a screensaver came on.

  • Bad idea. Will be obsolete on day one. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @01:52AM (#10595661) Homepage
    They're talking about a graphics card with little if any 3D acceleration. You usually get something at least that good, if not better, in the motherboard chipset. As an external graphics board, a 2D board, in 2004, is totally unnecessary.

    It might be more worthwhile to work on better relationships between Linux developers and Via. Via sells a large fraction of the motherboard chipsets (if it's not Intel, it's probably Via) and, as a commodity part manufacturer, doesn't have a strong business interest in a proprietary interface.

    If Via can be brought on board (assuming it isn't already) that provides more leverage for dealing with other vendors, like nVidia.

  • Sounds good to me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ikekrull ( 59661 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:15AM (#10595732) Homepage
    Make an X.org accelerator - There are a lot of people who dont care much for pushing polygons, but would love to have a fast, high quality grahics card that intergrates with X.org or XFree86 and works without hassle.

    Support multi-head operation with robust Xinerama support, good colour calibration etc. and provide hardware acceleration for compositing, video4linux overlays, SDL hardware blitting, X primitives, Freetype font renderers, DirectFB acceleration - this card could form the heart of every low-cost or embedded linux system sold in existing or emerging markets round the world, and provide significantly better 2D desktop acceleration than ATI or NVidia, who seem to put 100% of their efforts into appeasing the Doom3 players.

    Even if its not a match 3D-wise to a Geforce FX6800, it wouldn't be hard to do a better job of supporting Linux APIs than 90% of the manufacturers out there.

  • hardware wants to be... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geoff lane ( 93738 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:26AM (#10595768)
    ...free!

    Concider the pocket calculator. Every low end pocket calculator is now made in China and the wholesale cost must be $5 or less each; yet these calculators have all the functions that a $100 calculator had just 10 years ago.

    The same process will happen to graphics and video cards. The chinese will license and tweek older card designs and flood the market with $10 cards that are "good enough" As they will be running very low cost operations there will be no desire to spend money developing and supporting in-house drivers.

    If the Open Source community wants to lobby any company, start with these chinese companies. They will be open to any method of reducing costs.

  • YES! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Vo0k ( 760020 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @02:44AM (#10595818) Journal
    Okay, Free Software community aside (we already know our answers and reasons) - why should a hardware manufacturer hire a team of experienced coders to write drivers for every platform out there? They can save quite a lot on just releasing a "bare bones" driver i.e. for Windows and providing only some Q/A and help (AND full documentation) and have Linux, BSD etc drivers written for free? :) They make their sales from hardware anyway, drivers are and always (or at least for a very long time) have been available for free and as long as new features in drivers are coming, they just boost card sales.

    So... why pay when you can have the same thing for free?

    And as to "opening up the design" - add some fast layer of indirection or something alike, just obscure the hardware a -tiny- bit and you're safe - competition won't steal your hardware design - hackers need the API hooks and specs, not internal plans.

  • that would be great (Score:4, Interesting)

    by geg81 ( 816215 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @03:07AM (#10595881)
    Graphics cards have become the single greatest hassle when installing Linux. Many of them don't even work correctly in frame buffer or VESA mode anymore, and if they do, they are slow.

    I think that we are in for a major change in graphics hardware, going from more proprietary, special-purpose hardware to basically vectorized general-purpose hardware. If you keep the card more general purpose, you will probably at least get lots of orders from universities and research labs working on new ways of doing 3D graphics and using 3D graphics cards for compute-intensive applications.

    On the other hand, Linux hardware vendors and users would probably also like to have a cheap, low-end card that just works with every OSS and supports commonly used functions. So, something with good 2D acceleration (both bitblit and Postscript models) and some cheap 3D support would serve those needs. And such a card could also become popular for Windows if it accelerates Windows desktop functions well and (in contrast to all the proprietary trash that's out for Windows) has a simple, clean, and hence reliable, driver.

    A couple of points, though. First, it's probably the high-end open 3D card that would pay the bills, at least initially, and it would be sold to a niche market. But a high degree of programmability and flexibility would be its selling point. Second, sadly, decent Windows support would probably also be important for it to sell well because many people still want to have the option of booting into Windows.

    I think this could be a good way for a smaller graphics card company to get a steady revenue stream because, while the market is small in relative terms, it is probably a decent size in absolute terms and you'd have it largely to yourself.

    Oh, another thing that would be important would be good marketing: banner ads on OSS sites, getting the drivers into X implementations, making sure the major distributions include suport, etc.

  • Play off the uniqueness of FPGA's and Openness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by WoTG ( 610710 ) on Friday October 22, 2004 @03:12AM (#10595899) Homepage Journal
    I know nothing about how much money, time and resources are required to design a graphics card or layout an FPGA. However, my uneducated initial reaction is that this would be very tough to pull off financially. I'm afraid that most of the posts on /. and KernelTrap aren't particularly enlightening either. The variations on "if it's cheap and plays Doom III", and "I'll buy one, maybe two, then another one in 3 years" really aren't helping to make a business decision.

    My view, is if there were ways to play off the FPGA and the openness angles to find some niche markets that could foot the development bill and provide some manufacturing volume, there might be a way to pull this off. Later, as the design improves, the bill of materials goes down with volume, and Moore's Law helps performance, the design will make more sense for more and more mainstream markets.

    What niches? Well, I don't know. A semi-cheap, semi-standard way to get an FPGA must be useful for someone. Maybe include special video processing functions that enable dirt cheap embedded CPU's to do motion detection? Maybe an all purpose, programable co-processor for HPC apps that happens to render a GUI as well?

    Where does the cross platformness that a fully open source driver and known design have the most benefit? Heavy industrial tools? Science? Interactive TV? Security? My bet is on some sort of embedded market.

    Then there are creative financing options that might be useful, things like preorders, sponsorships, bounties. Maybe not starting with a fully open license, i.e. split out the driver core like nVidia, but have a contract with someone like the FSF to open source the complete driver when a certain volume has been achieved.

    Anyway, I've probably done enough uneducated rambling...

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