8-bit isa card with OpenGl support?

[JT64]

Maybe im just dreaming abit OpenGL probably was not even invented when production of 8-bit cards went out of fashion. But maybe there is some 16-bit card with OpenGL that is backward compatible with 8-bit isa slots?

With this said and done i dreaming a little bit of a bigger project running ELKS on 8086 with ported GCC developing environment, would let vintage hobbyist developing a port of Brook GPU. Brook GPU is a general purpose graphic processing unit emulator, that allow applications developed within the Brook stream language take advantage of the gpu
as a parallell processing unit.

Maybe there could be interest in creating an Linux ELKS+Brook distribution.
Brook stream language uses the OpenGL and DirectX9 API to use the gpu for general purpose processing.

Dreaming big is good isnt it. But i have this gut feeling it actually will happen.

At least if there is an available OpenGL card for 8086 with a reasonably fast GPU.

A bit strange though thinking that they actually could have used the GPU to make the computers faster in the XT era isnt it.

JT

 

[NobodyIsHere]

Maybe im just dreaming abit OpenGL probably was not even invented when production of 8-bit cards went out of fashion. But maybe there is some 16-bit card with OpenGL that is backward compatible with 8-bit isa slots?

With this said and done i dreaming a little bit of a bigger project running ELKS on 8086 with ported GCC developing environment, would let vintage hobbyist developing a port of Brook GPU. Brook GPU is a general purpose graphic processing unit emulator, that allow applications developed within the Brook stream language take advantage of the gpu
as a parallell processing unit.

Maybe there could be interest in creating an Linux ELKS+Brook distribution.
Brook stream language uses the OpenGL and DirectX9 API to use the gpu for general purpose processing.

Dreaming big is good isnt it. But i have this gut feeling it actually will happen.

At least if there is an available OpenGL card for 8086 with a reasonably fast GPU.

A bit strange though thinking that they actually could have used the GPU to make the computers faster in the XT era isnt it.

JT

Hi!

OpenGL is a software API and will run fine on a plain framebuffer VGA although the performance would suffer compared to an accelerated VGA card.

I suspect with enough searching you could get an OpenGL or similar implementation like what used to be known as MESA working on a plain VGA especially on a 386 or greater PC running Linux. Performance would not be good but you could do it.

However, what you seem to be asking for is an accelerated 8 bit VGA card with a full blown GPU implementation. I doubt very much you find much in the way of GPUs running on 8 bit VGAs. Its possible but highly unlikely. Especially a GPU that supports the recent GPGPU standards. Those tend to favor only the most recent GPUs.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch

 

[JT64]

Hi!

OpenGL is a software API and will run fine on a plain framebuffer VGA although the performance would suffer compared to an accelerated VGA card.

I suspect with enough searching you could get an OpenGL or similar implementation like what used to be known as MESA working on a plain VGA especially on a 386 or greater PC running Linux. Performance would not be good but you could do it.

However, what you seem to be asking for is an accelerated 8 bit VGA card with a full blown GPU implementation. I doubt very much you find much in the way of GPUs running on 8 bit VGAs. Its possible but highly unlikely. Especially a GPU that supports the recent GPGPU standards. Those tend to favor only the most recent GPUs.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch

Hello Andrew thank you for your reply, as i understand it the Brook programming language use the OpenGL 1.3+ to emulate general purpose instructions to perform calculations and processing.

So the processing can be done in any GPU or CPU with OpenGL 1.3+ API.
Some cards probably older cards do not support OpenGL 1.3+ fully, but would not that meant that those parts fall back and is done on processor?

Brook seem to be able to implement a virtual graphic card to use as backend to perform the openGL instructions within the CPU. But that is not what i am trying to do.

You talk about an OpenGL implementation on plain framebuffer card what do that mean, is the computations of 3d graphics and rendering shaders all done in CPU?

I know see another GPU programming language called SH that will work on older graphic cards where the GPU support ARB_vertex_program on OpenGL.

But this is probably recent features to maybe i could try it to get it up on an 486 with PCI have a new ATI PCI card laying around.

Would it be possible to port or develop a Linux distribution where mainpart of programs and kernel is compiled under SH or Brooke streaming language and run on GPU?

Is GPU oriented OS languages possible?

JT

 

[Trixter]

Maybe im just dreaming abit OpenGL probably was not even invented when production of 8-bit cards went out of fashion. But maybe there is some 16-bit card with OpenGL that is backward compatible with 8-bit isa slots?

While there were a select few custom cards that had rudimentary acceleration of some functions, they were not standard and usually paired with custom software for things like CAD stations. The closest thing you will find to any of these made in quantities over 1000 is the IBM PGA.

That's the long answer. The short answer is: No.