New open source GPU is free to all | Hacker News Reader

New open source GPU is free to all

tomshardware.com

117 pointselorant26 comments

Not yet open source, but there are plans to open source the stack as mentioned by the article which references this HN post from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836745

> Barrie wrote in a Hacker News post on Wednesday.

Sigh. In the old days, everyone in the media somehow have the unwritten rule to not even mention HN by name or link directly to it.

If anyone is wondering why HN quality goes down hill.

I love this sort of project; and it is really impressive. However, as the article quotes, but the headline misleads. This is not about making a practical GPU free to all. Mesa's Software rendering is vastly better and more useful if you want a libre GPU.

Quake 1 at 60 FPS! FOSS has created a GPU with rough performance parity to the original Voodoo Graphics card from 1997!

Being constrained to a low-end FPGAs is quite a handicap.

Even high-end ($10k+) FPGAs would be a severe disadvantage compared to where ASICs were 10+ years ago.

So no point to be snarky.

how do you know they were being snarky? I consider what they said to be a good thing.

And it's not even 60FPS. According to the article it can manage 44FPS at 720p.

For comparison the original Raspberry Pi can run Quake 3 at ~30 FPS at 1080p.

That said, he mentioned that the software was hard to build and there is a lot of optimization potential still available.

Are you kidding me? A modern CPU should run Quake at 600FPS at 720p. Yes, CPU.

Probably way faster than that. 3000 fps on a standard 2024 CPU without a GPU wouldn't shock me. (If optimized for AVX2/AVX-512.)

But this is running on a low end FPGA. No ultra-wide vector FP units, no massive SRAM caches, etc.

Ok, you try building a better one then.

What an inspiring passion project! Very ambitious first Verilog project.

I’m struggling to understand what’s “free” here, did he design his own board and IC? Or just the software side?

From TFA:

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 [0] on Wednesday.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39836745

Right it’s those legal issues that I’m trying to understand, the article says he used off-the-shelf parts which usually means encumbrances. I initially thought this was like risc-v where he’d done ALL the work, which seemed insane, the amount of work it appears he did is also crazy for a single person to do. I was just curious on how much was his own.

He mentioned something about his job possibly being a hindrance to releasing everything as open source. This guy has been in the video game industry for a long time so there's a chance he does similar graphics work as a day job and there could be crossover technical details that his employer might take offense to. The hardware itself is just a Zynq Ultrascale+ module attached to a custom board, probably using reference designs from the various component manufacturers so I doubt there's an issue releasing that. Those Zynq modules are not cheap so this is still definitely a toy and not anything useful for everyday computing. You could buy a RTX 4060 Ti for probably less than the price of the entire FuryGPU hardware stack.

Seems not open source (yet) and slow fpga (but did have a start). Any open APIC version?

design might be FOSS but not the actual, real, physical GPU

I don't like the way videogames have monopolized almost all consumer tech discussion.

Please show me this rendering smoothly a Windows 11 desktop, GNOME, KDE, a PDF reader, a news website

It's not really 'about' videogames though - Quake has just become an extremely useful reference/testbed because it's open source, very well written and easy to port.

You see it in experiments and graphics papers all the time. It makes total sense to use it.

All rendering is done in 3D these days. Even your desktop. Making games better makes everything better.

I was going to write a flippant comment, but I am now genuinely curious if anyone has made a desktop with game middleware like Unity, UnrealEngine, or Godot

Take a look at the Godot subreddit. I've seen at least one or two people who made desktop tools with it.

Any of the VR Virtual Desktop apps are certainly done in UnrealEngine or the like, but I think it's really just a virtual display for your computer and the 'desktop engine' is still windows if I'm interpreting your comment correctly.

The way any of the modern compositors work is essentially the same.

Godot editor, a desktop app, is made in Godot itself afaik

PC Gaming is the last group of consumers who pay for software that does not run in a web browser.

If you are interested in the continuation of personal computing on open platforms, don't leave out gamers.

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