The 3DFX Voodoo was not the primary devoted 3D graphics chipset by any means, nevertheless it turned the favorite for players among the many early mass-market GPUs. It could be discovered on a 3D-processing-only PCI card that sat on the function connector of your SVGA card. The Voodoo took any recreation that supported its Glide API into the world of (for the time) easy and delightful 3D. They’re price a bit now, however if you happen to don’t fancy forking out for mid-’90s silicon in 2026, there’s another choice. [Francisco Ayala Le Brun] has carried out the 3DFX Voodoo 1 in SpinalHDL for FPGAs.
The write-up goes into the Voodoo’s structure. The place the components of a contemporary GPU are programmable for the assorted capabilities it will possibly do, on this half they’re devoted {hardware} capabilities for the assorted graphics methods the chip can carry out. Implementing such an structure on an FPGA led to bugs and timing issues, and the write-up offers with that intimately.
The entire thing might be discovered in a GitHub repository if you happen to’re curious, and is unquestionably price a learn for anybody inquisitive about Nineties retrocomputing. 3DFX themselves would finally be swallowed by Nvidia, a rival whose choices would overtake them on the finish of the ’90s, however they nonetheless characterize a considerably particular second. Don’t overlook, if in case you have the actual factor, you possibly can in all probability improve its reminiscence.
Header picture: Konstantin Lanzet, GFDL.
