Open Graphics Project


The Open Graphics Project 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.

OGD1

The project's first product was a PCI graphics card dubbed OGD1, which used a field-programmable gate array 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 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 used for the FPGA and the RTL used for the ASIC are planned to be released under the GNU General Public License.
It has 256 MiB of DDR RAM, is passively cooled, and follows the DDC, EDID, DPMS and VBE VESA standards. TV-out is also planned.

Versioning schema

Versioning schema for OGD1 will go like this:
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OGD1 components

Main components of OGD1 graphics card

Divisions/terms related to OGP

;Open Graphics Project :The group of people developing OGA, its written documentation, and its products.
;Open Graphics Architecture :The trade name for open graphics architectures specified by the Open Graphics Project.
;Open Graphics Development :The initial FPGA-based experimentation board used as a test platform for TRV ASICs.
;Traversal Technology :The commercial name for the first ASIC products, based on the Open Graphics Architecture.
;Open Graphics Card :Graphics cards based on TRV chips.
;Open Hardware Foundation :A non-profit corporation whose charter is to promote the design and production of open-source and open-documentation hardware.