3D Archive

Mesa 7.5 has been released, the main new feature is the Gallium3D, infrastructure, which is a new architecture for building 3D graphics drivers. Phoronix has more details: "Mesa 7.5 also brings support for several new OpenGL extensions, reworked two-sided stencil support, updated SPARC assembly optimizations, initial support for separate compilation units in GLSL compiler, and various other fixes and optimizations."

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

"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."

"Excitement in the Open Graphics community is quite high as it approaches its first production run of the FPGA-based 'Open Graphics Development' board, known as 'OGD1'. It will be available for pre-sale this month with the first units expected to ship soon thereafter. As an insider in this group, I had a unique opportunity to interview several of its members, including: Timothy Miller, the experienced hardware engineer who first started the project (as well as the company, Traversal Technology, which will produce and sell OGP designs), and Patrick McNamara, an interested amateur tinkerer who founded the Open Hardware Foundation."

Kerneltrap has an interview with the creator of project VGA. "The project aims to develop a simple, low budget, open source, VGA compatible video card available this year. Michael is also a member of the Open Graphics Project, but started Project VGA in order to get something affordable on the market as soon as possible."

"The leading question most of you are likely wondering is why there hasn't been anymore ATI GPU specifications released in over two months. Well, as we have shared in earlier articles, AMD has had limited staff devoted to sanitizing the documentation and getting it cleared by their legal department for release. However, that is about to change. AMD's John Bridgman has confirmed that they are in the process of hiring new people to do all of the planned documentation and support work that will help the open-source community. Within a couple weeks, these new AMD employees will begin this crusade."