3Dfx, the name that started the glory rise of 3D gaming on PC, and that name is often associated with the Voodoo GPU. 30 years later, one guy on YouTube sought to bring it back with a bit of “frankenstein magic” via the power of engineering and a bit of electricity.
The host of the video is none other than PixelPipes, one of the online personalities who dedicated their interest to 3D graphics and technologies, where he’s joined by Romanian hardware reverse-engineer “sdz” and showcased the now 12MB-powered card boosted from the original’s 4MB, followed by an extra texture mapping unit, making it a total of 2. Specifically, he added 4MB to the pair of existing 2MB, each, making it 6MB per side, which means 12MB in the end.
Why it is possible in the first place lies within the card’s design from the foundation level, as the geniuses back then set up a clever multi-point bus layout between chips: an FBI (Frame Buffer Interface) handled polygons while a TMI (Texture Mapping Unit) dealt with textures, linked by a 2×16-bit bus. The write bus could chain up to three TMUs, passing data along in series. And what do you know, logically speaking, it’s like a modern GPU at this point.
The card was also made to support multi-GPU deployment from the get-go, with then partners like Quantum3D manufacturing specific models with extra TMUs, RAM expansions, and even single cards running dual setups where arcade machines and professional use cases dominated those sorts of SKUs.
However, it’s kind of disappointing in terms of software integration, as PixelPipes mentioned that Quantum3D’s own drivers are buggy, so Direct3D is a no-no, while Glide is still okay, since a bunch of classic games are runnable via some DOS-era autoexec.bat trickery. But it is still interesting to see there’s still a group of people willing to do some backporting magic just to see what happens “if human time travels and brings future ideas into the past”.
Check out the full video if you’re interested.
