Enthusiasts build their own 3dfx video card – the VoodooX has 32MB of RAM and DVI output

Since October 2022, Twitter user @oscar_barea has been posting the results of his work on a custom vintage 3dfx Voodoo card. His custom «VoodooX» is based on the 3dfx VSA-100 GPU, which has been used in various 3dfx Voodoo cards from Voodoo4 to Voodoo5. It’s not going to be one of the best graphics cards, unless you want to roll back the clock to the late 90s, but it’s a fun project regardless.

It’s a fun project.

A vintage 3dfx Voodoo5 GPU sold at auction for $15,000 early last year. Any prototypes of 3dfx hardware at this point represent a piece of timeless computer history, as the company and its assets were sold to Nvidia after bankruptcy in 2000. Before that ignominious end, however, 3dfx was one of the first and greatest names in consumer-accessible 3D acceleration.

According to @AshEvans81, who is also involved in the project, the card uses auctioned «new» VSA100 chips that were popularized in the Voodoo4 GPUs. This means that modifications to allow the VoodooX to run with 32MB of RAM still end up fitting within the VSA100 specification (the Voodoo4 4800 AGP boasted 64MB), although, as you can see from the original thread, it took a lot of effort to do so.

See the original thread.

The project took Oscar Barea and Ash Evans’ hard work and sincere dedication to retro computer hardware, and some of us have fond memories of the 3dfx Voodoo era. There aren’t many people looking to revive archaic GPUs from before the turn of the millennium, let alone ordering boards to try and create a functional graphics card with new features.

They’re not as keen on reviving archaic GPUs as they were before the turn of the millennium, let alone ordering boards to try and create a functional graphics card with new features.

The work here is really impressive, especially the new DVI video output support. Anyone who has had to deal with analog VGA video knows that the video quality is much lower than with the now largely abandoned DVI interface, which was sort of the predecessor to the modern HDMI standard. The immediate visual improvement offered by DVI, even on such older hardware, looks quite nice.

Another thing to note is that the DVI interface is not the only way to improve video quality.

The project is limited to 32MB of RAM for now, but it’s hoped that in the future there will be a switch to toggle between 32MB and 64MB of RAM. Once that hurdle is cleared, the VoodooX could be the best Voodoo graphics card ever made. Just ignore the 24-year hiatus, because these things… they take time.

And it’s a good thing that the VoodooX has been around for a while.