Hello, I think you guys have done an amazing work but the opengraphics project is looking stagnant, maybe dead. I have experience making engineering products and sooner or later you always need the same thing: someone buying your products. It seems you have very good engineers working on a hard problem but you dismissed the "marketing" thing, so I'm going to put out here some ideas about what could make ogp to success. I know ogp is your baby but please don't feel bad about this email, but as the feedback it is.
As much as people like me like the idea behind ogp nobody I know could justify spending money on it because it does better than anyone else ...err... nothing. I know what you are thinking: We are competing with Nvidia or AMD, we can't be better than them!! but yes you can be better the same way that Andruino is better than anybody else in what it does. Ogp had tried to compete doing fixed pipeline OpenGL, this is not even the present, it is past, every single GPU maker is making it more and more flexible with OpenCL and shaders; OGL ES eliminates fixed functions altogether. And it represents years of hard work nobody notices until they try to replicate it. Once you are done you could play doom with it...but today everybody has installed a proprietary card that works so much better, nouveau drivers are starting to work well with 3D support(they had already done the most difficult work so they will work very well on the coming months). Marketting talk(engineering guys hate this): The first thing a company needs to find is a niche she can serve better than anybody else, a concrete need that being open she could satisfy while either Nvidia, Intel or AMD couldn't, and that is what ogp could thrive doing. About the rest, well, forget about it, it will come when you can serve your niche and evolve. What could you do? First pick a levered play field. If you compete pick something new that any company is new at. I suggest a very basic OpenCL implementation with a very basic OpenGL support for vertex and pixel buffers, no shader support(OpenCL can do whatever shaders can) . 90% of OpenGL is going to become obsolete in the near future. Nvidia, AMD and OpenVK are kings on games, so focus on the market of "doing something useful with a GPU" for companies, Universities or individuals that open source is unrivaled for. Linux is used on phones or TVs for a reason, you can do whatever you want with it without messing with NDAs, trade secrets, politics, or asking permission. Governments and companies love it because it eliminates friction(time, resources) and cost and improves privacy and security(they know what is executing in the computer and they can fix it their selves). You have already done a lot of the necessary work. You do not need to make the Opencl kernel functions yourself, if you create a basic OpenCL implementation that does simple operations on buffers someone else will fill the gaps(people only use a few of them, and they are easy(but boring and takes time,so it is ideal work for the community to do) to do). Something as simple as that is terrible useful if it is open, even as simple as adding multiplying and subtracting and dividing numbers. I have used FPGAs for that, but they had terrible support for Linux and mac, and were very rigid. But please create something useful for something, even if it small or incomplete, or the company and all the effort you had done will die. Today from my perspective ogp does not look useful for any real application. The only thing that is fixed in current GPUs is vertex rasterisation so ogp could be the only GPU that lets you program it on the FPGA. Make it your strength not your weakness, let people mess with it. One size doesn't fill all in reality, companies like CAD software makers or movie studios need to control exactly whatever they draw on the screen-picture so they control the quality. On some cases they could win orders of magnitude of performance if they control it too as the usual GPU default approach uses brute force subdivision and filtering, and they know how to program shaders so OpenCL is very easy for them to use(and they can reuse their own code). Don't try to compete in what makes graphic cards vendors great, focus on what you already have and use for your advantage, like the FPGA flexibility. OpenCL support for Linux or macOSX is not that great, for Nvidia you have Parallel Nsight only for Visual Studio. You can make ogp great for people that wants parallel processing for speech, image or video recognition and generation, robot control or sensibility(like parallel touch info) just adding OpenCL... but does not want all the overhead the graphic card brings, maybe even easily deactivating the visual output if not needed in the application. If an openhardware solution exist, someone will create a good program to debug the GPU kernels that today is a mess because GPU info is proprietary. If you ask companies like google I bet they already have a lot of parallel problems to solve, and they are interested in controlling it with hardware they could tune their selves like they do with linux Android with the GPU. They have the money that you need so much so it could be a good idea partnering with them. Bye _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
