The article title is straight up misinformation at present. From the article itself:
The FuryGPU is set to be open-sourced. “I am intending on open-sourcing the entire stack (PCB schematic/layout, all the HDL, Windows WDDM drivers, API runtime drivers, and Quake ported to use the API) at some point, but there are a number of legal issues,” Barrie wrote in a Hacker News post on Wednesday. Because he works in a tangentially related vocation, he wants to make sure none of this work would break his work contract or licensing etc.
Nothing against OP who simply copied the title, nor the project author. This is impressive but it’s not yet open source and there may be legal hurdles preventing it from becoming so.
That’s fair. I’m hoping for the best outcome.
If they never release the source, including all the fpga verilog files then this is pointless to the open source community.
Edit: actually I just realized my comment is kind of pointless. Even if he released the fpga source code, a thing a lot of projects like these never do, it still wouldn’t be possible to reproduce one of these using only free and open source software. This is because the only fpgas that let you program them using open source software and not a locked-down windows-only bloatfuck program that needs an internet connection and licensing are the lattice ice40 fpgas. Tl;dr this can’t be fully “open source”.
I wonder if it would be possible to make an ice 40 based video card that could still do opengl.
Fuck yes. When normal modern video cards start costing too much for the common person to afford, at least we’ll still be able to play quake.
All this text, yet nowhere its mentioned whether it runs Doom. Clearly the most important thing to run on any device
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say if it can run Quake, it can safely run Doom as well.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say if it can run Quake, it can safely run Doom as well.
The original Voodoo 1 graphics card could run Quake, but NOT Doom. Thanks Obama!
Only because the Voodoo couldn’t do 2D at all - it had a passthrough on the back, so you’d connect your 2D-capable graphics card to it.
Oh, I’m aware! It just felt funny that the very first consumer dedicated 3D graphics card prove that poster’s assumption wrong. In any other case they’d be right. In fact, in those days in 1996, there was the SECOND graphics card that had a 3D processor that DID do 2D graphics too, the Sierra Screamin’ 3D (with the Rendition Verite GPU). It was about 2/3ds the cost of the Voodoo 1 (3DFX) even if the Sierra wasn’t quite as fast. You’d buy the Sierra because you wanted dedicated 3D but couldn’t afford a high end 2D card and the high end 3D card.
OG Doom does not support (or need) hardware 3D acceleration. It’s not a polygonal rendering engine.
Relatedly, and probably not to anyone’s surprise, this is why it’s so easy to port to various oddball pieces of hardware. If you have a CPU with enough clocks and memory to run all the calculations, you can get Doom to work since it renders entirely in software. In its original incarnation – modern source ports have since worked around this – it is nonsensical to run Doom at high frame rates anyhow because it has a locked 35 FPS frame rate, tied to the 70hz video mode it ran in. Running it faster would make it… faster.
(Quake can run in software rendering mode as well with no GPU, but in the OG DOS version only in 320x200 and at that rate I think any modern PC could run it well north of 60 FPS with no GPU acceleration at all.)
I remember those old games that would run faster to the point of hilarity if you put them on anything more modern than they were originally intended to run on. Like the game timing is tied to the frame rate.
There used to be dip switches on some older machines (386/486 era), eventually ‘turbo buttons’ that accomplished the same thing, toggling would cut the clock speed so older software would be compatible with clock speed. Those turbo buttons were more a ‘valet mode’ than anything, but it all died out before the Pentium/Athlon era to say the least
Command and Conquer Generals lets you choose game speed for skirmish matches, the natural cap of 60 and an option to uncap. You need superhuman reflexes to play with an uncapped speed on modern hardware !
I’m confused, he made a homemade GPU that can’t be mass-produced, and it runs a 30 year old game at 44 fps, and it may (or may not) actually become open source, and I’m supposed to be excited about it?
Open sourced physical technology is only in its infancy, you may be exited about this trend.
Ive seen open sourced hacking tools, openassistant wireless connectors, complete keyboards.
Its about time someone started on open sourced proper pc hardware, no matter of how small scale it starts.
Imagine a future where you can 3d print a 2d printer and its refillable cartridges at home, with extensive manuals on diy repairs and maintenance and no costs beyond the raw resources and your time.
Open source demonstrates humans cooperating with no profit insensitive. Exactly what capitalism calls impossible. When i first learned about linux it felt incredibly lacking compared to windows, nowadays its my main os, its surpassed windows in anything except good Nvidia drivers.
What year is it?!
The way people dress, Quake, it’s 1996!
I keep reading the word Fury as Furry
Something something furmark
That would be disgusting.
*awesome
Nah nothing awesome about furries.
lots awesome about blocking you
Damn a dog fuckers gonna block me.
Yeah, why don’t they lean into it and call it FurryGPU much better.
RISC-V plans to make ISA extensions that will enable it to work better in graphics applications. Look forward to truly open-source graphics
