Open Source Graphics Card Available For Advance Orders 262
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."
Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:4, Informative)
All video cards cost this much... (Score:5, Informative)
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!
you might be getting ripped off if... (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [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 [xilinx.com]
If you want to have it on PCIx:
http://www.xilinx.com/products/devkits/HW-V5-ML555-G.htm [xilinx.com]
You can also get FPGAs socketted for AMD's Hypertransport bus and Intel's FSB:
http://xtremedatainc.com/ [xtremedatainc.com] (Altera FPGAs)
http://drccomputer.com/ [drccomputer.com] (Xilinx FPGAs)
http://nallatech.com/ [nallatech.com]
http://celoxica.com/ [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...
Re:you might be getting ripped off if... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:why not pci-e based? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Uh...not for me! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Informative)
Yup... price of a nice GeForce and the time it takes to hack the identifier as described here [techarp.com].
Re:you might be getting ripped off if... (Score:4, Informative)
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 [mit.edu]
Ray Tracing:
http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/s2007/PROJECTS/5/main.html [mit.edu]
There are hundreds of videos and code for FPGA projects up at http://web.mit.edu/6.111 [mit.edu] (see project appendices for code).
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Except it is. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So far, nobody has brought up the actual value (Score:1, Informative)
This is a research & development tool for designing hardware or for use in highly specialized applications.
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No open FPGA tools, though... (Score:4, Informative)
If you can find an FPGA for which there are open-source development tools, by all means please let us know about it. Meanwhile those of us that want to get actual work done with FPGAs will make do with the closed-source tools.
People routinely appear in comp.arch.fpga saying that they will write open-source FPGA development software, but none have succeeded at that yet. Perhaps the underestimate the magnitude of the problem. Xilinx has literally thousands of man years invested into developing their tools; it's not something for which one person or a small team can knock out a functional replacement in a year or two.
I try to use open-source software as much as possible, and I release much of the software I write in my spare time under the GPL, but for certain problems, open-source software just isn't going to be practical in the near term.
Re:PCI-X (Score:3, Informative)
Re:100 replies and nobody's mentioned Project VGA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I think not (Score:3, Informative)
Once the design is finalized it's going to be ported as a chip. The initial production cost for fabbing a chip is near 1 or 2 million for about 100k unit. Once the chip is fabbed the unit cost drop dramatically. Using that final chip you can save a lot because you need a simpler board and less component than the development board.
Also once fabbed the chip is going to have more pixel pipeline and will be running a lot faster.Why more pixel pipeline and faster? A fabbed chip is more efficient than a FPGA both in term of surface usage and performance because of the way the circuit is made. So it allow the developer to use a maximum of surface. Since rendering graphics is a highly parallel task the graphics pipeline is easy to duplicate. Also usually in most design today the chip size is more dictated by the IO density than the core so there always space to add more pipeline.
Re:Classical Hand-Drawn Animation (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:3, Informative)
YHBT. YHL. FOAD.~
Re:Serious Question....Please answer if you know! (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:3, Informative)
The developers must be cursing slashdot at the moment
OT: "dirth" (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, you said exactly the opposite of what you were trying to say
Re:62,000 gates? NVIDIA is heading for a billion.. (Score:3, Informative)
The FPGA card is NOT intended to compete with ATI and Nvidia. My understanding is that even the eventual ASIC version isn't intended to compete with the high-end cards.