Determined enthusiasts are building a custom 3dfx graphics card — VoodooX has 32MB RAM and DVI output

Since October of 2022, user @oscar_barea on Twitter has been posting his ongoing progress on a customized vintage 3dfx Voodoo card. His custom “VoodooX” is based on the 3dfx VSA-100 GPU, which was used in a variety of 3dfx Voodoo cards, ranging from Voodoo4 through Voodoo5. This will not be one of the best graphics cards, not unless you want to roll back the clock to the late 90s, but it’s a fun project regardless.

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

According to @AshEvans81, who is also participating in the project, the card is using auctioned-off “new” VSA100 chips popularized by the Voodoo4 GPUs. This means that the modifications to get VoodooX running with 32MB RAM are still ultimately within the spec of VSA100 (the Voodoo4 4800 AGP boasted 64MB), though the original thread will show this still took a lot of effort to get working.

The project has required a lot of hard work and genuine dedication to retro PC hardware from both Oscar Barea and Ash Evans, and some of us have fond memories of the 3dfx Voodoo era. Not many people care to revive archaic GPUs from before the turn of the millennium, not to mention ordering boards to attempt to create a functional graphics cards with new capabilities.

The work here is truly impressive, in particular the new support for DVI video output. Anyone who’s had to deal with analog VGA video knows that video quality is much lower than with the now mostly abandoned DVI interface, which was a precursor of sorts to the modern HDMI standard. The immediate visual improvement offered by DVI, even on this old hardware, looks quite nice.

The in-progress project is still limited to 32MB of RAM, but the hope is to have a switch that toggles between 32MB of RAM and 64MB of RAM. Once that hurdle is cleared, VoodooX could be the best Voodoo graphics card ever made. Just don’t mind the 24-year gap, as these things… they take time.