Open Graphics Project

Open Graphics Project
Commercial?	Yes
Type of project	Open hardware
Website

The Open Graphics Project (OGP) was founded with the goal to design an open source hardware / open architecture and standard for graphics cards, primarily targeting free software / open source operating systems. The project created a reprogrammable development and prototyping board and had aimed to eventually produce a full-featured and competitive end-user graphics card.

The project's first product was a PCI graphics card dubbed OGD1, which used a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip. Although the card could not compete with graphics cards on the market at the time in terms of performance or functionality, it was intended to be useful as a tool for prototyping the project's first application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) board, as well as for other professionals needing programmable graphics cards or FPGA-based prototyping boards. It was also hoped that this prototype would attract enough interest to gain some profit and attract investors for the next card, since it was expected to cost around US$2,000,000 to start the production of a specialized ASIC design. PCI Express and/or Mini-PCI variations where planned to follow. The OGD1 began shipping in September 2010, some six years after the project began and 3 years after the appearance of the first prototypes.

Full specifications will be published and open source device drivers will be released. All RTL will be released. Source code to the device drivers and BIOS will be released under the MIT and BSD licenses. The RTL (in Verilog) used for the FPGA and the RTL used for the ASIC are planned to be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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