3D Archive

"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."

With the Open Graphics Project advancing slowly a few students picked up the idea to do it all smaller, faster, and more importantly, cheaper. From the site: "We'd love to have an OGD1 card and are amazed by it's specifications, but for us and a lot of people, this card is simply too much. So that's where this card comes in, to give you all the fun of developing on programmable hardware, designing video cards and architectures, for a price that won't hurt your wallet."

"Today, with the coming introduction of the NVIDIA 780i chipset, NVIDIA is looking to make serious changes to what is possible with enthusiast systems by launching a new technology platform. The name of the new standard is ESA - Enthusiast System Architecture. Its goal is to provide information and control to enthusiasts not just for NVIDIA motherboards and video cards, but to provide that information and control for many other components in an ESA-enabled system. The actual protocol is OS independent. This is very important for the future of ESA, as it will eventually allow ESA to operate with any platform."

"On the Phoronix Forums we have been running a Q&A with the developers of the Nouveau project. For those out of the loop or new to Linux, the Nouveau project aims to provide an open-source 2D/3D graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware. After collecting a number of questions from our readers, KoalaBR and Marcheu have answered these questions. The questions range from whether there will be open-source SLI support to asking if NVIDIA has ever contacted the Nouveau developers."

The OpenGL Architecture Review Board officially announced OpenGL 3 on August 8th 2007 at the Siggraph Birds of a Feather (BOF) in San Diego, CA. OpenGL 3 is the official name for what has previously been called OpenGL Longs Peak. OpenGL 3 is a true industry effort with broad support from all vendors in the ARB. The OpenGL 3 specification is on track to be finalized at the next face-to-face meeting of the OpenGL ARB, at the end of August. This means the specification can be publicly available as soon as the end of September, after the mandatory 30 day Khronos approval period has passed. Also presented were the changes to the OpenGL Shading Language that will accompany OpenGL 3. For more details check here, here and here.

"DirectX 10 would not work with XP, and that was fine and dandy. It was an honest technical reason why you could not backport DX10 to XP without a major rip and replace operation. Microsoft wasn't going to bend on this one at all." More here.

"The last time we had written an article on Nouveau, the community project working on developing an open-source 3D display driver for NVIDIA hardware, was this past January after being enlightened by glxgears finally being able to run on NVIDIA's NV4x GPUs. Since then many developments have occurred with this open-source NVIDIA driver as we have covered in several news postings. In this article today we will share with you where the Nouveau project stands today from a user perspective as well as testing out the driver on a few more NVIDIA systems."

"At Phoronix we are constantly exploring the different display drivers under Linux, and while we have reviewed Sun's Check Tool and test motherboards with Solaris in addition to covering a few other areas, we have yet to perform a graphics driver comparison between Linux and Solaris. That is until today. With interest in Solaris on the rise thanks to Project Indiana, we have decided to finally offer our first quantitative graphics comparison between Linux and Solaris with the NVIDIA proprietary drivers."

"Last week the first open-source ATI R500 driver had entered the world. This new driver (named the xf86-video-avivo) is very early into development, but a small set of developers have been working on reverse engineering this GPU class for the past couple of months. This driver does not yet contain any 3D functionality or support for features that most end-users expect. At this point, the driver just contains very basic initialization and set video mode support for a portion of the Radeon X1000 family. Even with this very basic R500 driver, we couldn't help but to explore the Avivo driver for the past few days."

"XGI Technology is still in business, but what has happened to them? We once saw hope in them for providing discrete graphics processors to take on the NVIDIA and ATI duopoly, but they have since discontinued their Volari 8 series. While they're no longer producing these desktop chips, they remain an active player in the server and embedded graphics industry - accompanied by their OSS driver."

"It's late, but it's finally here. This morning AMD will be formally announcing their long-awaited Radeon HD 2000 series, or perhaps better known as the ATI R600 GPU. The AMD Radeon HD 2000 series features DirectX 10.0 (well, for those that use Microsoft products), Avivo HD, a programmable tessellation unit, CrossFire support, and much more. This morning we have our technology preview of ATI/AMD's next generation GPUs along with what's in store for Linux and the R600 series support." Update: AnandTech has a 31-page review of the R600.