Open Source Graphics Card Available For Advance Orders

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."

$1500 video card!

They're probably going to own 100% of the high-price videocard market with that.

Re:$1500 video card!

Yeah but there's a $100 discount for early orders, and they're throwing in a $65 programming interface cable absolutely free! So $1500 is a gross exaggeration ... it's really only a $1335 video card.

Re:$1500 video card!

You're wrong. The video card is only $63 so it's just a 1337 video card.

Re:$1500 video card!

Hey, I thought open-source was supposed to be free!

I call shenanigans!

Guess it's time to go back to my cheaper boot-legged graphics card [cf.ac.uk].

Re:$1500 video card!

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.

Re:$1500 video card!

I'm not sure which choice you think should be obvious, but do you really think this graphics card is aimed at the gaming market, and if so, what gave you that idea?

Re:$1500 video card!

so what do they do after those 9 sales?

Re:$1500 video card!

Nah there are lots of other FPGA boards availible many of which are frankly a much better deal than this board.

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.

Re:$1500 video card!

Priced a Quadro FX lately?

Yup... price of a nice GeForce and the time it takes to hack the identifier as described here [techarp.com].

PCI-X

That's PCI-X, not PCI-E. The rest of the stats are also a retro-blast as well.

I'm not sure what kind of architectures you could really test with this thing. It has slower memory on it than is on my motherboard. I honestly believe you could write software renderers faster than this thing.

Re:PCI-X

> This is a prototype!

But this 'product' makes no sense to me. They admit it is more useful at this point as an FPGA dev kit. But $1500 is a lot to plunk down for an introduction to FPGA develeopment.

This [xilinx.com] product direct from xilink makes a lot more sense for someone getting started. Ok, it only has 128MB instead of 256M, a single VGA port instead of dual DVI and a smaller FPGA. On the upside though the cheaper board is PCIe instead of PCI-X which is getting hard to find a machine to stick it into. But it is in the same family and when ya actually have a design that won't fit in the smaller part is when you should think about buying a bigger one.

why not pci-e based?

Pci and pci-x is dieing

Re:why not pci-e based?

Because it's a prototype card and not something meant to compete realistically with Nvidia and ATI.

The first short-term goal is to implement a prototype PCI graphics card dubbed OGD1 using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. Although this card will not be able to compete with existing graphics cards on the market performance- or functionality-wise, it will be useful as a tool for prototyping the first application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) board, as well as for other professionals needing programmable graphics cards or FPGA-based prototyping boards. It is hoped that this prototype will attract enough interest to gain some profit and attract investors for the next card, since it is expected to cost around $2,000,000 to start the production of a specialized ASIC design. Later AGP and PCI Express variations will follow.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_graphics_project [wikipedia.org] If I had the money to spend I'd help support them because I'd love to see them get the money to build a truly open video card that could compete with it's modern rivals.

Re:why not pci-e based?

There are two entries in the FAQ [traversaltech.com] about this. Short answer is "PCI is more popular with users of FPGA kits" and "PCI-X is backward compatible with your 32-bit 33MHz PCI slots".

This is cool

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.

All video cards cost this much...

At this stage of their development.

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...

you might be getting ripped off if you're paying $1500 for a Spartan-3 board.

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...

Sure, it might be more expensive. But the point is, people who buy this are not just buying the hardware (yet). They are supporting the R&D these guys are doing, and enabling them to move closer to the production stage. It's an investment in future technology.

Frankly, I think this is great. Once they reach the stage of being able to compete with a low-end Nvidia/ATI on features and price, I would consider buying one. The cards could be optimised to work with whatever operating system you would be running on the machine, and would be guaranteed to have no driver compatibility issues.

I hope they are successful with this and can move into other areas. An open soundcard would also be very nice to have.

Cancel the project: this is a waste of time.

There is no way in hell these people can compete with ATI/NVIDIA. Have you ever been to NVIDIA? Do you have *any* idea how many really smart people they have working on these problems 60 hours a week?

This project would be so much better off reverse engineering Cuda to make an open source driver than trying to make their own graphics chip. Hell, even Intel is having a very hard time getting a high-end graphics chip to work, and they've got so many more resources than this project.

Open source software works because anyone can hack on it and produce comparable stuff with zero initial investment. Hardware does not work that way. There is just way too much of an initial investment required. Even with FPGAs it's too expensive, and you're way too far behind to start with.

These people are idiots to think they can succeed here unless one of them has a 90nm fab in his or her backyard. (Sorry -- this is qualitatively different than trying to write your own OS, which is done all the time in undergrad classes.)

Re:How about reprogramming it as a CPU?

Not the point. The processor is not designed for that. You stuff microcode and data into it from the normal CPU and turn it loose, and it does its thing WAY faster than the normal CPU can. This thing has no disk IO and would not run well at all as a general purpose CPU. It's like trying to go grocery shopping with a Formula 1 car.

Re:Uh...not for me!

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

Re:Uh...not for me!

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.

You can get similar hardware [xilinx.com] for far less or far better hardware [xilinx.com] for a bit less right now directly from Xilinx if that is your thing.

Re:Pretty crappy FPGA

The SPARTAN 3 is a hobbyist FPGA. Cheap, and a lot of gates, but slow. A Virtex 4 would've been nicer :)

The thing is already $1500, quadruple the cost of the most expensive part on the board. Yikes!

Re:Pretty crappy FPGA

The SPARTAN 3 is a hobbyist FPGA. Cheap, and a lot of gates, but slow. A Virtex 4 would've been nicer :)

Kind of appropriate considering it's basically a graphics card designed by hobbyists, don't you think? I don't think a Virtex is the best choice, either: it uses a lot of power and has an onboard PowerPC core that wouldn't really be that useful. Any graphics card implemented on FPGAs will use a lot of power for relatively poor performance. To compete, you'll need enough orders to get your design fab'ed by TSMC or someone.

Re:Pretty crappy FPGA

Well, hopefully the next version will upgrade to the SPARTAN 300 FPGA instead. Not exactly cheap, but much more efficient.