[HN Gopher] Original source code for the PowerVR Series 1 GPUs
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Original source code for the PowerVR Series 1 GPUs
Author : HieronymusBosch
Score : 128 points
Date : 2022-03-23 11:43 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| anthk wrote:
| >powerVR
|
| I was hoping for the source code of Intel GMA and such, but no
| luck :p.
| WalterGR wrote:
| A bit more context here:
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PowerVR-...
| marcodiego wrote:
| What does it means for linux/android on old iphones?
| girvo wrote:
| Nothing. This has nothing to do with PVR mobile chips, but is
| the drivers for the original desktop cards from the 90s.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| Nothing, the drivers aren't of use for anything sold this
| century.
| LelouBil wrote:
| I really like the fact that they are open sourcing stuff recently
| ! I'm helping to make linux distros run on chromebooks and
| mine(the acer chromebook R13) is using a powerVR GPU
| (https://github.com/hexdump0815/linux-mainline-mediatek-mt81x...)
| , I struggled a lot trying to use their drivers.
|
| I hope I will be able to use their drivers soon enough !
| mrpippy wrote:
| There's some mentions of (classic) Mac and RAVE support in the
| code, but I don't remember any mention of PowerVR cards, games,
| drivers, etc. on the Mac back in the day. Anyone else?
| bronson wrote:
| Diamond Multimedia got the hardware working on Macs in 1996.
| The demos were just outstanding. Trying to make it reliable for
| real-world games, though, was tedious. Endless triangle
| mismatches. Nobody was sure how much additional effort would be
| required to produce a reliable product for sale.
|
| At the time, Diamond's desire for additional Mac revenue was
| dwindling, along with its share price, so leadership probably
| made the right call to cancel the project (along with all their
| future Mac products).
| Aissen wrote:
| It's really nice to see Imagination's newly gained openness (see
| https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Open-Sou...
| for more context). The company's peak is behind it since Apple
| slowly dropped their IP. Despite being hurt by their policies
| during the poulsbo days, I still hope that this isn't a swan song
| and that it will help their business. Nobody wins with a heavily
| concentrated GPU market.
| ksec wrote:
| >The company's peak is behind it since Apple slowly dropped
| their IP.
|
| They never did. They are still using IMG's IP even today. Just
| look at their PVRTC support. It was possibly one of the biggest
| lie ever and caused their stock to collapse. Now they are sold
| to a Chinese Capital and are pushing towards competing in PC
| GPU market.
| monocasa wrote:
| I think it depends on what you mean by IP and it's
| unfortunate that the hardware space overloads those terms. My
| understanding is that they aren't using any IMG hardware IP
| blocks, and are simply licensing a couple ancient patents.
|
| There are large similarities from Apple hiring large portions
| of the dev staff though. Apparently IMG capped it's tech
| staff at PS75k/yr total comp and so Apple just opened it's
| own office across the street.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| Aissen wrote:
| Hum, thanks for the headsup, it was my understanding that the
| Apple "GPU" compute part was mostly built in-house, and that
| only the fixed-function part were from Imagination at some
| point, then dropped. I didn't know they were still using it.
| Would you have more details ?
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Imagination and Apple signed some kind of new agreement in
| 2020 but what that exactly was I am not sure if the details
| are officially avail able.
|
| https://www.imaginationtech.com/news/imagination-and-
| apple-s...
| Aissen wrote:
| It's unclear whether they use hardware blocks or just
| patent licenses. IMHO a texture format support is not a
| big enough signal.
| ribit wrote:
| I think you have all of this right. Parts of IMG IP Apple
| still uses is the TBDR stuff, compression and some other
| fixed-function things. It is unclear how much of it Apple
| has modified. The actual compute and scheduling engine is
| Apple's own.
| [deleted]
| marcodiego wrote:
| Looks like it is from 90's era cards, right? Anything that could
| be of value for modern devices?
| pabs3 wrote:
| Is this likely to be useful for more recent but still ancient
| PowerVR mobile GPUs?
| monocasa wrote:
| No, but it might make Dreamcast emulation better?
| tyingq wrote:
| Seems not likely:
|
| _" The first series of PowerVR cards was mostly designed as
| 3D-only accelerator boards that would use the main 2D video
| card's memory as framebuffer over PCI."_
| stuaxo wrote:
| > As of right now, due to licensing concerns we have been unable
| to supply some libraries and headers provided by SciTech Software
| for "The Universal VESA VBE" However, this was only used for the
| Tomb raider port, in order to tell the PCX hardware the details
| of the framebuffer.
|
| Fair enough - who can we contact to try and get UniVBE open
| sourced? There's a lot of early graphic card info locked in
| there.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Title is wrong... misleading.. clickbait.. and the whole post is
| super irrelevant because of it.
| w0mbat wrote:
| This is what the company pivoted to in the 90s when their
| VideoLogic video overlay card business went out of fashion. They
| have been adept at changing course multiple times.
| pavlov wrote:
| I had one of these around 1997. It was pretty fast and
| affordable, but had some major holes in its feature set. I
| remember it didn't support OpenGL style custom blending, so a
| game that rendered explosions using an additive-blended sphere
| would just display an opaque expanding sphere.
|
| Games that were specifically tuned for its feature set could look
| great though. These cards had sharper VGA output than the 3dfx
| Voodoo which required an analog passthrough from a separate 2D
| graphics card (the Voodoo was a pure 3D accelerator).
|
| I thought about getting a 3dfx Voodoo but then realized I don't
| really play 3D games anyway. The PowerVR clocked in maybe four
| hours of total use by me, and nobody wanted the card because of
| its reputation.
| rasz wrote:
| >These cards had sharper VGA output than the 3dfx Voodoo
|
| These cards had no VGA output whatsoever, and rendered straight
| to dedicated 2D cards framebuffer.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| "Explosions don't alpha-blend correctly" is particularly odd
| given that TBDR's strength was supposed to be alpha blending.
| wsc981 wrote:
| Ah that makes me wonder if my father's PC had a similar GPU.
|
| I played Half-life at the time, and shortly after the tentacle
| boss, you'd had to swim underwater. However this water was just
| rendered in a opaque color, so at that point I could not finish
| the game. Not an idea where to go.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| (A 20 years late) hint - just switch to software mode, duh.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Code is problematic: multilne defines:
| https://github.com/powervr-graphics/PowerVR-Series1/blob/c8c...
| Looks like they didn't know the "do{...}while(0)" trick.
| tom_ wrote:
| Defines in a .c file (or .cpp, .m, etc.) are special-purpose
| and don't have to be suitable for use in all contexts.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Grandpa story time!
|
| My first job was at Imagination Technologies in 2006, working on
| the first SGX chips that shipped in the iPhone 3GS and the first
| iPad. I did not last long.
|
| At that time the folks at Apple would send us mockup UI apps with
| placeholder textures, just to test the performance on the chip.
| They told us they were building the next generation of the Apple
| TV -- only much later we learned we had been working on the first
| iPad.
|
| Working there was a pretty surreal experience. We were
| understaffed and underpaid. To a first approximation the teams
| consisted of a core group of British engineers alongside with a
| revolving door of young European immigrants like myself.
|
| Every Friday morning we would be offered free doughnuts in the
| canteen, and since the nicest ones were in short supply, some
| people would arrive early and wait. The coffee came from a
| vending machine and was terrible, though.
|
| There were some heroic efforts to ship stuff on time, especially
| on the hardware side of things. I have mad respect for the people
| who worked there under those circumstances.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It is always frustrating to see the people that underpin these
| massive financial successes mistreated like this.
| nomel wrote:
| > that underpin these massive financial successes
|
| It very often takes hard, non ideal, working conditions to
| _make_ financial success. This story is from a period before
| that success.
| dboreham wrote:
| Vending machine coffee was pretty standard back then in UK
| tech offices.
| astrange wrote:
| American ones too - there may have been an espresso bar,
| but the free option for us was a Starbucks "iCup" machine
| whose output tasted and smelled nasty.
|
| Now that I think about it, maybe we should've checked the
| water supply.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| It's pretty standard in Europe semi/HW sector as it's no SV,
| so there's no massive cluster where people can quickly find
| alternate employment at a competitor across the road if they
| get mistreated by an employer. In the EU semi space, changing
| jobs, often means changing country, which implies a lot of
| friction many people can't or don't want to deal with.
| david-gpu wrote:
| To be fair, the company was hemorrhaging money at the time.
| The main "office" building, where I worked, was actually a
| run down warehouse in the middle of nowhere. Compare the
| following two pictures, from 2009 [1] and from 2017 [2].
|
| [1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Imagination+Technologie
| s/@...
|
| [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Imagination+Technologie
| s/@...
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> The main "office" building, where I worked, was actually
| a run down warehouse in the middle of nowhere._
|
| That's nothing, I used to work for one of Europe's biggest
| semi companies and some of our offices were made of
| shipping containers lol.
|
| IIRC even the mighty Intel had to completely overhaul their
| offices in 200? after some Jay Lenno visit embarrassed them
| for looking like the '80's.
|
| Why is it that SW companies pride themselves with nice
| offices while semi/HW companies have some run down trailer
| park offices and see no issue with that?
| megous wrote:
| SGX544 next... that could actually be useful to someone. Like
| people with 8 year old already outdated tablets.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| This is exciting! If they open source Power VR 2 then would help
| enable deeper understanding of the Sega Dreamcast's GPU right?
|
| If I recall correctly the SH-4 CPU arch is already open. Just
| imagine documenting the console completely at a deep level!
|
| Wonder if it might enable some now innovative ideas. We see lots
| of those open source "retro" consoles popping up that rely on old
| now open and documented 8-bit CPUs. Maybe this could allow the
| creation of some "Retro" 3d consoles?
| JoachimS wrote:
| Please update the title to clarify that it is the source for the
| driver, not the GPU chip.
| snvzz wrote:
| For the drivers. Not the GPUs.
| greatgib wrote:
| Awesome, after so many years they finally open source it!
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(page generated 2022-03-23 23:01 UTC)