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The goal is to produce a re-implementation of the #9 Ticket to Ride IV card (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Nine_Visual_Technology https://en.wikipedia.or

by lambda 13y ago

The goal is to produce a re-implementation of the #9 Ticket to Ride IV card (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Nine_Visual_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_Nine_Visual_Technology) which is a fixed-function graphics card released in 1998. As they say in the first paragraph, "The reason behind this was to provide a binary compatible graphics core for vertical markets: Medical Imaging, Military, Industrial, and Server products." This is not something that will be remotely competitive with modern GPUs. Their $1,000,000 stretch goal would be to implement a modern shader engine, but given that they aren't offering any actual hardware, I'm not sure how they hope to get to that point.

agumonkey 13y ago
I missed the 'history' paragraph. I remember the glorious #9 days. But this is so old I'm thinking it would be easier to have virtual driver translation. Even with overhead a phone gpu could outperform easily.
pjc50 13y ago
You've got it. The $200k level gives you a 2D graphics card from 1998. It looks like their original target market was people who want an embedded emulation of this sort of ancient system so they can run DOS, Windows 95, or ancient Linux/X11 on it. Markets in which changing the software is horribly expensive due to compliance costs. The $400k goal targets Direct3D 8. That appears to date to about 2000: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/directx-and-xna/directx-8-graphics-and-video-a-fresh-start-r1247 http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/directx-an... (I'm impressed that article is still up from 2000!) $1m is not totally unreasonable for the shader-based design at commercial rates. Last time I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for a shader-capable fully open graphics card delivering working silicon, I came up with two years, $2.5m, and a hiring shortlist.

by lambda 13y ago

agumonkey 13y ago

I missed the 'history' paragraph. I remember the glorious #9 days. But this is so old I'm thinking it would be easier to have virtual driver translation. Even with overhead a phone gpu could outperform easily.

pjc50 13y ago

You've got it. The $200k level gives you a 2D graphics card from 1998. It looks like their original target market was people who want an embedded emulation of this sort of ancient system so they can run DOS, Windows 95, or ancient Linux/X11 on it. Markets in which changing the software is horribly expensive due to compliance costs. The $400k goal targets Direct3D 8. That appears to date to about 2000: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/directx-and-xna/directx-8-graphics-and-video-a-fresh-start-r1247 http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/directx-an... (I'm impressed that article is still up from 2000!) $1m is not totally unreasonable for the shader-based design at commercial rates. Last time I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for a shader-capable fully open graphics card delivering working silicon, I came up with two years, $2.5m, and a hiring shortlist.