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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Even high-end ($10k+) FPGAs would be a severe disadvantage compared to where ASICs were 10+ years ago.
So no point to be snarky.
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.
But this is running on a low end FPGA. No ultra-wide vector FP units, no massive SRAM caches, etc.
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
Please show me this rendering smoothly a Windows 11 desktop, GNOME, KDE, a PDF reader, a news website
You see it in experiments and graphics papers all the time. It makes total sense to use it.
If you are interested in the continuation of personal computing on open platforms, don't leave out gamers.