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On 5/16/06, Ray Heasman <lists@mythral.org> wrote:I thought it was pretty clear that the programmable shader discussion was forward-looking, hypothetical, and something that's to be experimented with on a small scale with the FPGA. I did mention that I'd be willing to entertain the idea of skipping a generation if it were necessary, but that's only if it's necessary. Also, more than once in this discussion, I referred to OGA as a "fixed-function fragment shader". That means it's not programmable. That means it's quite minimal. But you also said you wanted rotation. If you have scaling and rotation, then you have all the hardware you need to do arbitrary distortion. The only texture feature we have that is "advanced" is MIP mapping, but I intend to implement that with a relatively simple state machine that does sequential fetches, thereby drastically limiting the hardware required. We've had ASIC vendors tell us we could do this. I don't know HOW they mean to do it, but if they can, we'll use it. Remember that many ASICs are pre-fabbed. All the silicon is done and the first few layers of metal. When ours is produced we only need masks for the last few layers of metal. If they've got blanks with DACs on them, GREAT. If not, we'll have to do something different. You've got to be kidding. Aside from one or two products that have ancient and very small FPGAs on them, OGD1 is dirt cheap. If you compare it to something even remotely comparable in terms of features and logic area, it's a steal. Things cost what they cost. Do you want us to sell it at a loss? There may be some room for non populating some parts, but it probably wouldn't bring the price down much. This is exactly opposite of the truth. OGP started out as a project at Tech Source. They decided to drop the project, so I was left with two colleagues and the OGP list. Going it alone, I needed a name and a way to conduct business on my own. Traversal is just a front for the OGP. Companies don't do business with the Linux Kernel Mailing List, but they DO do business with OSDL. Traversal is a way to centralize business. Of course, being a business, it has to make a profit, and we may find it necessary to work on projects not directly related to open source stuff (but not to the detriment of open source!). But the primary intent is for Traversal to build what the community wants. The drawback is that if the community gives us bad information, and we don't figure that out, Traversal will go down. Actually, it IS a goal. We have graphics as a long-term goal to serve as a focusing principle, but my longer-term goal is an array of FOSS-friendly products, including (or particularly) those that help hobbyists design their own hardware. OGD may change form, but it'll never go away as long as we can afford to exist. The basic point behind Traversal is to: - Enable the community to spec hardware for us to design or design it themselves. - Build that hardware in a way that is affordable to a wide audience of people. So, OGD1 isn't "just" a dev platform. It's a major focus. Turning complete designs into ASICs is what will allow others to afford to benefit from the results of the community's efforts. I also want an array of "high end" product that are natively FPGA-based so that they are always reprogrammable. It's just graphics that probably requires an ASIC for it to be affordable. This is true in any case. Why? There hasn't been a primary change in direction since early 2005. If you want to know what OGA is, all you have to do is read the source code. Oh, and there are PDFs that describe in English what it does and the math behind it and everything. If you had done that, you'd have realized long ago that it's not a programmable shader design. OGA is both a subset and superset of OpenGL. Really, it's just a bunch of generic graphics math. In one sense, you could say that I put together a design that was very general for both 2D and 3D and then rearranged it a bit to conform to OpenGL. That doesn't mean I locked it down into something too restrictive or something. Do some general research on 2D and 3D graphics and how the math works. Then read the OpenGL spec and see what it specifies. Then read about OGA and see how it conforms to those two sets of ideas. It would be senseless to intentionally incompatible with OpenGL if it's trivial to make it conform without causing any harm. Exactly how much intertia do you want us to push against? Plus, you've given us a chicken-and-egg problem. Have you talked to the X.org people about this? Have you gotten any feedback on what features they want? I'm not going to arbitrarily break things just to be different. I have some information on what the needs are and assembled a design based on that. If you can get better information, I will alter the design (if necessary). Gate count is a question we'll be able to answer in the not too distant future. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list Open-graphics@duskglow.com http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
