Open Source Graphic Cards — A reality?
Monday, January 8th, 2007Hi All,
Some of you, like me, really curse both ATI and NVidia about not being more open with their drivers. I’d dearly love Intel to release some AGP graphic cards that I could use on the non-Intel motherboard in my desktop PC. Another dream, was a truly open video card. Some of you may also have seen the discussions on linux-kernel, regarding an open-source friendly graphic card.
Whilst chatting in #qemu (irc.freenoden.net), one of the other chatroom members mentioned this page.
The prototype, is a PCI based FPGA development card with dual DVI output, TV-out and three 300MHz Analog to Digital Converters. After it finishes stress testing, Traversal the company founded by members of the Open Graphic Project will not only be selling this board for those interested in a serious FPGA development tool but will offer the card at a great discount for the Open Graphics Project. Under the Open Graphics Project this development board will continue to grow until it becomes a graphic card in it’s own right. However the project does not finish there, because we will need to move from the standard PCI interface onto other faster interfaces. And after the engine and drivers have been finished we then want to investigate moving the graphic’s engine into an ASIC, which will enable our design to reach even greater speeds and very reasonable prices.
The card is powered by two FPGAs and provides dual DVI monitor outputs along with S-Video for TV output as seen in the photo below.
Apparently, the target is to achieve 20~30 frames per second in Quake III at 1280×1024 — quite an admirable target for a FPGA-based design. I will be keeping a close eye on the development of this card, as this is looking very interesting. I wish the people involved the greatest success. 