The article title is straight up misinformation at present. From the article itself:
The FuryGPU is set to be open-sourced. “I am intending on open-sourcing the entire stack (PCB schematic/layout, all the HDL, Windows WDDM drivers, API runtime drivers, and Quake ported to use the API) at some point, but there are a number of legal issues,” Barrie wrote in a Hacker News post on Wednesday. Because he works in a tangentially related vocation, he wants to make sure none of this work would break his work contract or licensing etc.
Nothing against OP who simply copied the title, nor the project author. This is impressive but it’s not yet open source and there may be legal hurdles preventing it from becoming so.
OG Doom does not support (or need) hardware 3D acceleration. It's not a polygonal rendering engine.
Relatedly, and probably not to anyone's surprise, this is why it's so easy to port to various oddball pieces of hardware. If you have a CPU with enough clocks and memory to run all the calculations, you can get Doom to work since it renders entirely in software. In its original incarnation -- modern source ports have since worked around this -- it is nonsensical to run Doom at high frame rates anyhow because it has a locked 35 FPS frame rate, tied to the 70hz video mode it ran in. Running it faster would make it... faster.
(Quake can run in software rendering mode as well with no GPU, but in the OG DOS version only in 320x200 and at that rate I think any modern PC could run it well north of 60 FPS with no GPU acceleration at all.)
OG Doom engine uses pre-built lookup tables for fixed point trigonometry. (table captures the full 360 degrees for sine and cosine with 10240 elements)
I remember those old games that would run faster to the point of hilarity if you put them on anything more modern than they were originally intended to run on. Like the game timing is tied to the frame rate.
Nowadays I've been seeing lots of people porting Super Mario 64 as the challenge, as Doom is honestly beyond trivial at this point. I'm totally onboard, SM64 is a fantastic game, it shows off traditional shaded polygon and rasterization performance pretty well, and it's just plain fun to spite Nintendo.
There's a real challenge out there for the Cray 1. On paper, it appears fast enough, but the architecture makes it difficult to impossible in practice.
Subsequently, the project got a boost by the debut of Xilinx Kria System-on-Modules (SoMs), which combine “insanely cheap Zynq UltraScale+ FPGAs with a ton of DSP units and a (comparatively) massive amount of LUTs and FFs, and of particular interest, a hardened PCIe core,” enthused Barrie.
Yes, I understand, the bippity uses mumps in order for the many lutes to flips those zupps in their pacas.
Awww, I thought this was an ASIC. Slapping an FPGA on a PCIe card is decidedly less cool. Still, props for creating a usable GPU circuit description, that must have been a nightmare.
I'm confused, he made a homemade GPU that can't be mass-produced, and it runs a 30 year old game at 44 fps, and it may (or may not) actually become open source, and I'm supposed to be excited about it?
You should be impressed. Integrated circuits are insanely complex, and any general purpose processing hardware since the 90s is way too complicated for the human mind to comprehend.
Open sourced physical technology is only in its infancy, you may be exited about this trend.
Ive seen open sourced hacking tools, openassistant wireless connectors, complete keyboards.
Its about time someone started on open sourced proper pc hardware, no matter of how small scale it starts.
Imagine a future where you can 3d print a 2d printer and its refillable cartridges at home, with extensive manuals on diy repairs and maintenance and no costs beyond the raw resources and your time.
Open source demonstrates humans cooperating with no profit insensitive. Exactly what capitalism calls impossible. When i first learned about linux it felt incredibly lacking compared to windows, nowadays its my main os, its surpassed windows in anything except good Nvidia drivers.