Michael Meeuwisse of Project VGA, which spawned from the
Open Graphics Project for creating a truly open-source graphics card, announced today at FOSDEM 2008 that next month he hopes to ship the first of his prototype graphics cards. However, before you get your hopes up, this is a very low-end graphics card. The current Project VGA board has 16MB of SD RAM, Xilinx Spartan 3 s400 FPGA under 100MHz, and uses the PCI bus. These first-run prototypes will cost over $200 USD with no guarantees to work or warranties. Meeuwisse at least has been able to secure an order of the first batch of graphics cards from his university. All of the Project VGA work -- including the hardware information -- is available under the GNU GPLv3.
While this is a great concept, its current status and the hardware/price ratio really makes this suitable for just open-source purists or those having hobbies into FPGA programming. At least, unlike the Open Graphics Project, Michael Meeuwisse had at least hardware to show for this project less than six months old. More information on this ultra low-end open-source graphics card is available from
their project website.
