http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:19:41 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/21358/Video_of_OGD1_VGA_Emulation_Booting_in_PC/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21358/Video_of_OGD1_VGA_Emulation_Booting_in_PC/ You may recall the recent OSNews article about Linux Fund getting donations to supply developers with OGD1 boards. (OGD1 is a what you might call an "open source graphics card," with all designs, documentation and source code available under Free Software licenses. Technically, however, OGD1 is an FPGA-based prototyping platform with memory and video encoders on it. See the wikipedia article.) Since then, the FSF got involved and is asking for volunteers to help with the OGP wiki. The OGP had shown OGD1 driving a graphics display back in 2007 at OSCON. And now, the OGP has just announced technical success with the rather difficult challenge of emulating legacy VGA text mode. They even put up a video on YouTube of a display, driven by OGD1, showing a PC booting into Gentoo. Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:15:15 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 9 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News theosib http://www.osnews.com/story/21299/LinuxFund_OGP_Supply_Developers_with_Open_Graphics_Cards/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21299/LinuxFund_OGP_Supply_Developers_with_Open_Graphics_Cards/ LinuxFund and the Open Graphics Project are teaming up to raise funds and supply 10 Open Graphics Development boards to open source developers. After several years in development the Open Graphics project is offering pre-orders of development boards. The Open Graphics Project aims to design an open source hardware/open architecture and standard for graphics cards, primarily targeting free software/open source operating systems. LinuxFund is accepting donations on their website to help fund the project. Additionally you can pre-order an OGD1 board for yourself through Traversal Technology. Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:09:16 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 15 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News http://www.osnews.com/story/21200/Nouveau_Driver_Test_Day_on_Thursday_26th_March/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21200/Nouveau_Driver_Test_Day_on_Thursday_26th_March/ A Test Day is planned tomorrow (Thursday 26th) for the Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. This is a Fedora test day due to the inclusion of nouveau as the default driver in Fedora 11, but will be of interest to users of all distributions, as most are likely to switch to nouveau as their default driver in future, and all the work done by Fedora will be contributed to the upstream development of the driver. i586 and x86-64 live CD images are available, so anyone can easily help out with the testing without any kind of permanent changes to your machine. Wed, 25 Mar 2009 18:57:05 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 4 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News AdamW http://www.osnews.com/story/21195/OpenGL_3_1_Specifications_Published/ http://www.osnews.com/story/21195/OpenGL_3_1_Specifications_Published/ "Nine months ago the Khronos Group released the specification to OpenGL 3.0. OpenGL 3.0 brought version 1.30 of the GL Shading Language, the introduction of Vertex Array Objects, texture arrays, more flexible frame-buffer objects, and a number of other graphical features. What OpenGL 3.0 didn't bring was a major API revision that many developers had expected, and it was also arrived many months late. Today though, Khronos has announced OpenGL 3.1." Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:41:13 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 11 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News poundsmack http://www.osnews.com/story/20874/NVIDIA_CEO_Atom_Is_Going_to_Hurt_Software_Industry/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20874/NVIDIA_CEO_Atom_Is_Going_to_Hurt_Software_Industry/ Currently, NVIDIA is really missing out on the netbook market, which is dominated by all-Intel platform designs. NVIDIA has finally woken up to this reality, and the outspoken cofounder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang, has launched an all-out campaign to promote his company's Ion platform - and he isn't shy of flinging some poo to Intel and netbooks in general. Thu, 29 Jan 2009 12:11:34 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 45 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News http://www.osnews.com/story/20832/Mesa_7_3_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20832/Mesa_7_3_Released/ Four months after Mesa 7.2 was released, Mesa 7.3 has now officially surfaced. Mesa 7.3 has been in testing since earlier this month with it having gone through three release candidates. The new features found in this latest version of the standard Open-Source OpenGL stack is proper support for GLSL 1.20 and the Intel DRI driver now supports the Graphics Execution Manager and Direct Rendering Infrastructure 2. Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:46:14 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 1 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News Michael http://www.osnews.com/story/20610/The_RV770_Story_Documenting_ATI_s_Road_to_Success/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20610/The_RV770_Story_Documenting_ATI_s_Road_to_Success/ Anand Lal Shimpi, founder of Anandtech.com, had the opportunity to sit down with Carrell Killebrew, Eric Demers, Mike Schmit and Mark Leather, collectivley known as the designers behind the current crop of AMD graphics chips, and quiz them about how the RV770 graphics chip came about. In the article, Anand recounts the history that influenced the chip's design and the obstacles that were overcome from his two hours meeting with the design team. Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:32:26 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) 3D News, GL, DirectX 8 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News Flatland_Spider http://www.osnews.com/story/20563/VIA_Publishes_2D_3D_Documentation_Partners_with_OpenChrome/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20563/VIA_Publishes_2D_3D_Documentation_Partners_with_OpenChrome/ Earlier this year VIA announced they wanted to join the open-source bandwagon by establishing an open-source driver development initiative, releasing documentation and source-code, and to better engage with the Linux community at large. They have made a few small steps over the past few months, but today they have made their largest open-source contribution yet by releasing four programming documentation guides that cover the video, 2D, and 3D programming for their Chrome 9 graphics processor. In addition, they are now partnering with the community-spawned OpenChrome developers. Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:14:59 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 8 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News Michael Larabel http://www.osnews.com/story/20309/SGI_and_Khronos_Group_Publish_OpenGL_with_New_License/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20309/SGI_and_Khronos_Group_Publish_OpenGL_with_New_License/ SGI and the Khronos Group published a new license for OpenGL. "The license, which now mirrors the free X11 license used by X.Org, further opens previously released SGI graphics software that has set the industry standard for visualization software and has proven essential to GNU/Linux and a host of applications." New new license is shorter than the the FreeB license in version 1.1, which wasn't an Open Source license. Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:12:36 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) 3D News, GL, DirectX 15 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News zz http://www.osnews.com/story/20247/DirectX_11_Sooner_than_You_Think/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20247/DirectX_11_Sooner_than_You_Think/ With a preview version slated for November 2008 and beta versions as early as 2009, Microsoft's newest DirectX will be here sooner than you think. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case digs deep into DirectX 11 and discusses its new features and how it differs from DX10. While improved graphics are expected out of the new release, DX11 hopes to improve upon crunching complex graphics with the GPU through hardware tessellation, which many people hoped to see in DX10. Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:30:50 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 69 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News Jeremy http://www.osnews.com/story/20192/_OpenGL_3_0_a_Big_Step_in_the_Right_Direction_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/20192/_OpenGL_3_0_a_Big_Step_in_the_Right_Direction_/ With the SIGGRAPH OpenGL BOF now past, Nick Haemel from AMD has written a blog post about OpenGL 3 and the reasoning behind the choices made. "After testing an approach that would have a drastic effect on the API, requiring complete OpenGL application rewrites and not introducing any of the long awaited features modern GPUs are capable of [...] GL 3.0 takes two important steps to moving open standard graphics forward in a major way. The first is to provide core and ARB extension access to the new capabilities of hardware. The second is to create a roadmap that allows developers to see what parts of core specifications will be going away in the future, also providing the OpenGL ARB with a way to introduce new features faster." Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:31:20 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 28 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News Tony DeYoung http://www.osnews.com/story/19914/Nvidia_Reiterates_Position_on_Closed_Source_Driver/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19914/Nvidia_Reiterates_Position_on_Closed_Source_Driver/ Yesterday, we reported on the statement several kernel developers had signed that urged hardware manufacturers to open up their Linux modules and drivers. "We, the undersigned Linux kernel developers, consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable," the statement read. Nvidia, which delivers probably the most prominent closed-source Linux driver, has reiterated its position concerning this matter. Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:49:51 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 82 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19872/Nvidia_Blows_Out_Moore_s_Law_with_Fresh_Tesla/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19872/Nvidia_Blows_Out_Moore_s_Law_with_Fresh_Tesla/ "Nvidia pitches its Tesla hardware as a magical solution for the world's toughest computing problems. Just move your code that runs well across many processors over to the Tesla boards, and Shazam!. You enjoy sometimes 400 per cent improvements in overall performance. Despite such mind-blowing increases in horsepower, Tesla continues to occupy a space that one could characterize as ultra-niche. Only the brave few have navigated Nvidia's CUDA programming apparatus to tweak their code for the general purpose graphics processors inside of the Tesla systems. That ultra-niche, however, may grow into a niche over the coming year thanks to the introduction of more powerful Tesla systems." Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:32:04 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 2 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19641/Open_Graphics_Project_To_Announce_Pre-Orders/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19641/Open_Graphics_Project_To_Announce_Pre-Orders/ Open Graphics Project founder Timothy Miller recently noted on the project's mailing list that they are set to announce that their first hardware, the OGD1, is ready for pre-order. "The OGD1 design has actually been finished for a couple of months now," he began, explaining that they've been setting up a way to process pre-orders for the first 100 boards. The board will retail at USD 1500, with a USD 100 discount offered for the first 100 pre-orders. "These are pre-orders, not orders," Timothy continued, "that means the lead time is unpredictable. We don't have a stock. We will purchase a stock based on the number of pre-orders we get. Also, this means that if we never get a large enough number of pre-orders, we will be unable to fulfil them; all pre-orders would be cancelled, and no one would be charged anything." Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:01:48 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 24 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News irbis http://www.osnews.com/story/19399/The_History_of_the_Teapot/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19399/The_History_of_the_Teapot/ "As anyone who is into 3D computer graphics knows, there is something mysterious and special about The Teapot. It's not just any teapot - it's 'the' teapot. The teapot was made by Melitta in 1974 and originally belonged to Martin Newell and his wife, Sandra - who purchased it from ZCMI, (a department store in Salt Lake City). The teapot was eventually donated to the Boston Computer Museum but now resides in the Ephemera collection of the Computer History Museum. It's cataloged as 'Teapot used for Computer Graphics rendering' and bears the catalog number X00398.1984." Wed, 27 Feb 2008 21:27:59 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) 3D News, GL, DirectX 7 http://www.osnews.com/topics/43 News