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."
OK, I'm a programmer, not a HW guy... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:3, Interesting)
How about reprogramming it as a CPU? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is cool (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
So far, nobody has brought up the actual value - (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:$100 off on Preorder (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Uh...not for me! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
I'd like to see more general use (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [opencores.org] 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
Classical Hand-Drawn Animation (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:5, Interesting)
100 replies and nobody's mentioned Project VGA yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:National Public Computing? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:$1500 video card! (Score:4, Interesting)
Is it really a graphics card, or is it something that might possibly become one with the right FPGA programming.
Re:Pretty crappy FPGA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Cancel the project: this is a waste of time. (Score:3, Interesting)
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?