DJ_PAPA
Power Member
First Open Graphics board appears
CES 007 Encouraging project takes shape
CES 007 Encouraging project takes shape
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36761JOSEPH BLACK AND his team of graphics enthusiasts have been working for quite some time on a pretty encouraging project - an open-spec graphics card.
Thanks to our friend from Slovakia, we managed to track down the project and learned more about it.
This project is on the basis that a GPU should not end up with tons of propriatary software or hardware, containing hidden problems that aren't mentioned to the press, and yet cause nervous breakdowns for developers worldwide.
One of the situations I learned about is a certain bug with certain unnamed GPUs and it considers screw-ups with HDR - not fixable in a GPU - which of course, was not mentioned anywhere, and yet developers that experienced the problem thought they were doing something wrong.
This would not be so weird if it wasn't for the fact that the company not mentioned here wasn't touting HDR as their main feature, and even invited journalists to see briefings demonstrating its previous gen hardware having HDR, er, it didn't, with a certain 6-mil-$ game, but that's a long story.
Anyway, let's return to the subject. The first board is codenamed OGD1-256DDAV, and it's a prototype development board that comes with 256MB of video memory, two dual-link DVI connectors and a support for the third and fourth video interface - analogue and TV video outputs. The GPU is made from two chips, the main being the Xilinx Spartan-3 XC3S4000 FPGA graphics engine and the Lattice XP10 FPGA. That's currently, PCI code because the board uses a PCI interface.
Xillinx Spartan-3 comes with a 128-bit memory interface, offering memory bandwidth of 1.6 GB/s (more than GeForce2 GTS and Radeon 7000, whose perfomance are being targeted by project developers).
Anyways, if you want to help out guys in a way you can, you can visit its wiki-tiki page here: OGPN17. µ
