3dfx Voodoo 5 6000 video card reverse engineered and re-created by enthusiast

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by Hilbert Hagedoorn, Feb 19, 2021.

  1. Hilbert Hagedoorn

    Hilbert Hagedoorn Don Vito Corleone Staff Member

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  2. Fox2232

    Fox2232 Guest

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    Now imagine it on 7nm. Everything integrated 2048 times over. That would be 28B transistors. Apparently insane idea and wasteful too.

    But if anything, I would love to have real C64c chip and PCB remade into single chip with extra memory integrated (1MB would be enough). Few capacitors, transistors, ... around to deal with sound profile and i/o. Eeprom/tape/disk drive replaced with mere emmc.

    That would be fun. 2MHz? Extra turbo settings with 4, 8, ... MHz. Eats nothing. Runs "forever" on battery. Solar would be enough to feed it too.

    But it has to be real C64c chip, not emulator running on arm.
     
  3. OlivierMDVY

    OlivierMDVY Guest

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    nostalgia... I had a Voodoo 2, great experience using the Glide in many games.

    NVidia can thanks 3dfx for the SLI.
     
  4. Francesco

    Francesco Guest

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    You know the GPU shortage is to be taken seriously when a guy become so desperate to build a 3DFX by himself :D
     
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  5. wavetrex

    wavetrex Ancient Guru

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    That is PCI, not PCI express, and you can literally see a big fat MOLEX power connector...
     
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  6. TheDeeGee

    TheDeeGee Ancient Guru

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    I owned a couple of 3dfx cards back in the day.

    I know for sure i had a Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo 3 3000 and Voodoo 5 5500 AGP.
     
  7. Kaarme

    Kaarme Ancient Guru

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    I have a feeling it can't run Crysis.
     
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  8. Tknockers

    Tknockers Guest

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    I still have original Diamond Monster 3d 4Mb graphic card with original external cable.. in working order inside Pentium 133Mhz configuration. It's safely sitting somewhere in the attic :)
    I remember when I bought it just to be able to play Fifa 96 3d..
     
  9. Francesco

    Francesco Guest

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    Such memories. I owned both a Voodoo 1 and a Voodoo 3.
    I remember how incredible it felt when I first played Quake with the Voodoo 1... I could stand just in front of a wall without seeing a single pixel…. the wall was so blurry and undetailed, unbearable today, but at the time it felt so incredible.
     
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  10. Legacy-ZA

    Legacy-ZA Master Guru

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    But, can it mine? :)
     

  11. Andy Watson

    Andy Watson Master Guru

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    This was a great card before nvidia beat them up and then Ati beat nvidia up with the ATi 9700

    Of course in those days you could actually beat up the opponent by actually buying cards

    :D

    Great that people are still doing this still in Feb 2021.
     
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  12. asturur

    asturur Maha Guru

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    I recently discovered a company, analogue.co, producing such thing for snes/megadrive/nes and special gameboy recreated with programmable FCPGA. Seems cool
     
  13. XP-200

    XP-200 Ancient Guru

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    With the way things are going this might be my next video card. lol
     
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  14. sardine

    sardine Guest

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    still have my voodoo 3 and voodoo 2 in retro pc's here , AWE32 etc for dos / Win9x goodness.
     
  15. Silva

    Silva Ancient Guru

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    At a whooping 1fps per week!
     
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  16. dopus

    dopus Member

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    back in my student years 3dfx was the king of gpu`s. I had a vodoo 2 addon card for 3d and a matrox card for 2d.Then I upgraded to a vodoo banchee. Good times :)
     
  17. TimmyP

    TimmyP Guest

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    Why is it PCI? There is a mixed in photo of a real one and its AGP (obviously). Why go this far, but not have it be the original AGP or even PCIE?
     
  18. patteSatan

    patteSatan Master Guru

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    I ran 2 voodoo 2 in sli, when it was not supported anymore, was great in Quake/Quake 2/Unreal/Unrealtournament.
     
  19. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag Ancient Guru

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    PCIe has hardly anything in common with PCI or AGP beyond fundamentals. This was a reverse-engineered product, but not necessarily re-engineered (which is probably why there weren't really any noteworthy improvements).
    If the architecture is understood well enough, I don't see why porting it to PCIe shouldn't be possible, but the next issue is drivers. PCIe didn't exist at the time of this GPU, and at least for Windows, the drivers would also have to be reverse-engineered. There are open source drivers for Linux though so that could be a good place to start, but that leads to another issue: driver maturity. I think the Linux/Mesa drivers were entirely volunteer driven, and the last time there were any updates was 2013. It was in rough shape back then (with many broken/missing features). Both the DRI version and the kernel level drivers have been removed a while ago, so that means you'd have to resort to an old version.
     
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  20. waltc3

    waltc3 Maha Guru

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    In the beginning, every 3d game sold was GLIDE. I once owned a substantial GLIDE library. There was scuttlebutt that Microsoft was going to adopt GLIDE as the official Windows 3d API, but Microsoft decided to start its own 3d API, as we all know.

    While sites like Sharkey Extreme and Anandtech and others were going ape for "AGP texturing," 3dfx was honest about not supporting it because texturing out of their onboard ram was about 20X faster, more or less. (Which is why GPUs have so much onboard ram today--the PCIe bus even at 4.0 is far slower than onboard GPU ram.) The pundits just couldn't understand 2 +2 = 4, and they all panned 3dfx for not supporting AGP texturing. This is how far the pundits missed it completely--they lauded nVidia for its fake support of AGP texturing even though even way back then nVidia textured out of its onboard ram just like 3dfx. When Intel launched its first discrete 3d cards back then, the i7xx series, they all relied on AGP texturing and they were all unbelievably slow as a result--3dfx and nVidia ran rings around them. I bought two of them--a 4mb card, which I returned, and an 8mb card, which I refunded. Horrible. It was no surprise to see Intel drop out of the discreet 3d-card market after the failure of the i7xx series. While both 3dfx and nVidia were selling 16mb cards. The ignorance was strong in those days.
     
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