"This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers! In other words, their GPU specifications will be given to developers in the open. Therefore you shouldn't need to worry about another R200 incident taking place. The 2D specifications will be released very soon and the 3D ones will follow shortly."
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Member since:2006-02-28
It's perfectly possible to run opengl with an exported X display as long as the driver supports it. As far as I'm aware nvidia & intel drivers already support this config but performance won't be great though
What I'd like to see is the server generating a realtime h.264 stream - anti-aliasing 3d stuff would essentially be done for free by the codec, with a decent quad-core chip or gfx card capable of realtime h264.
Member since:2006-01-17
3D games are really low-latency realtime case: you need to deliver a frame between two vblanks, which is a problem over the network (network latency, en/decoding, buffering frames, etc.), especially if you spend time on en/decoding (also many codecs have frame difference stuff which may require more frames present to encode).
Edited 2007-09-11 08:48
Member since:2005-08-19
Will these specification make it possible to write a driver so I can put a 3D card in my headless server, have all OpenGL calls redirected and computed on this server and the results returned over the network?
You know how some people say that because X is 30 year old technology, we should dump it and start again?
Well, what you're asking for is 30 year old extensible technology (X), and the not particularly new GLX extension (GLX, not Xgl, which is something different).
Next time you hear someone say we should dump X, tell them to hollow out the bone in their head to make room for a brain. :-)
(I think I misunderstood your 'server' to mean 'server' in the X sense. Rather than do the 3D rendering on the application server, do it on a thin client with cheap 3D hardware on board. You're still running your actual apps on the application server, and getting beautifully rendered stuff on the display. Dave Richards from Largo is doing precisely this => check out his blog linked from Planet GNOME.)
Edited 2007-09-11 07:32
Member since:2007-01-27
Maybe I wasn't too clear in my question. The last possibility you mentioned as in the GLX extension is one option. You run your applications on the (headless) application server and display the output on your client having a massive 3D card using the locally DRI/OpenGL accelerated X server.
The other possibility is to have a 3D card in your (headless) applications server, do all OpenGL computations there and return the results somehow to your relatively weak client device with some older 3D card unsuitable to playing modern games with the local DRI/OpenGL accelerated X server.
For instance I have a Dell C600 laptop with an Ati Rage 128 Pro graphics card and it works fine for normal things. But when I want to play newer games I would have to buy a new laptop since I can't upgrade the graphics on this machine.
My suggestion is if I would put a modern AGP 3D card in my server (a repurposed old desktop machine) and run the 3D games and applications there and only display the output on my laptop in an efficient way, would it work so I wouldn't have to buy a newer laptop just because of the old graphics card.
Edit: I am probably thinking of what the Fusion project is going to with the integration of CPU and GPU, but that's still a few years away.
Edited 2007-09-11 09:51 UTC
"So in summary... Google has pulled the plug on support on a protocol they've helped popularize, after years of promising interoperability, for reasons that are dubious at best, and in a way that leaves people who don't jump to the new Hangouts app unable to talk to their contacts without any feedback that their IMs aren't getting through... And they've done that with no warning to anyone. I imagine there's a bunch of people out there wondering where some of their buddies have gone, or why their messages aren't getting responses, because this isn't documented anywhere." Google really messed this up. Such a dick move.
The Tizen Greek Community has some screenshots of a very recent build of Tizen running on a Samsung GT-i8800. It looks wholly unremarkable.Joint statement to The Next Web from Microsoft and Google: "Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube's API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time." Good to know these children stopped acting like little pricks. Can we have full Google support in Windows 8 now, please?
Yahoo is acquiring Tumblr, the microblogging and social networking website, for $1.1 billion USD. Tumblr offers little revenue but lots of eyeballs if Yahoo can monetarize them. Now Yahoo is bidding for Hulu, the streaming video service. After years of ineffective responses while Google, Facebook, and others took large chunks of the online advertising market, Yahoo is fighting back. Can Yahoo reignite the momentum it had at the turn of the century? What do you think?
"Sources have described iOS 7 as 'black, white, and flat all over'. This refers to the dropping of heavy textures and the addition of several new black and white user interface elements." I couldn't be happier.
"Ilja van Sprundel, a security researcher with IOActive, has discovered a large number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers, and has worked with X.Org's security team to analyze, confirm, and fix these issues."
"Google is facing a new antitrust probe by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission into whether the company is using its leadership in the online display-advertising market to illegally curb competition, people familiar with the matter said." Sucks to be Google today, apparently."In the midst of the major press blitz surrounding its annual I/O Conference, Google dropped some unfortunate news about its instant messaging plans. In several places around the web, the company is replacing the existing 'Talk' platform with a new one called 'Hangouts' that sharply diminishes support for the open messaging protocol known as XMPP (or sometimes informally Jabber), and also removes the option to disable the archiving of all chat communications. These changes represent a switch from open protocols to proprietary ones, and a clear step backward for many users." That's why I always say: only suckers trust companies."The wave of departures is a sign of internal struggle, but amidst all the bad news, there is a glimmer of hope. According to an anonymous HTC executive cited by WSJ, the crucial HTC One is selling 'pretty good so far'. The executive revealed that HTC sold about five million One units since launch, a performance that is deemed encouraging. However, sales have been limited by the persisting supply issues that still plague the production of the HTC One." Finally some good news for HTC. Five million units amidst supply constraints is very impressive.
"Sony gave the PS4 50% more raw shader performance, plain and simple (768 SPs @ 800MHz vs. 1152 SPs & 800MHz). Unlike last generation, you don't need to be some sort of Jedi to extract the PS4's potential here. The Xbox One and PS4 architectures are quite similar, Sony just has more hardware under the hood. Weâll have to wait and see how this hardware delta gets exposed in games over time, but the gap is definitely there. The funny thing about game consoles is that itâs usually the lowest common denominator that determines the bulk of the experience across all platforms. On the plus side, the Xbox One should enjoy better power/thermal characteristics compared to the PlayStation 4. Even compared to the Xbox 360 we should see improvement in many use cases thanks to modern power management techniques." AnandTech does its usual in-depth thing.
Member since:
2007-01-27
Will these specification make it possible to write a driver so I can put a 3D card in my headless server, have all OpenGL calls redirected and computed on this server and the results returned over the network?
I am using VNC to connect to my server and everything is running there but I can't run 3D stuff this way. It would be great if I could run 3D applications and games on the server and transparently display them on my laptop in an efficient way!
The only thing is that this protocol probably wouldn't be called VNC (Virtual Network Computing) anymore but ONC (OpenGL Networking Computing).