The 3DFX Voodoo Lives Again In An FPGA
Hackaday • • technology
Key Points:
- The 3DFX Voodoo was a popular early mass-market 3D graphics chipset favored by gamers, known for its Glide API that enabled smooth and impressive 3D graphics in the mid-1990s.
- Unlike modern GPUs with programmable components, the Voodoo's architecture consisted of dedicated hardware functions for specific graphics tasks, posing challenges when replicating it on FPGAs.
- Francisco Ayala Le Brun has successfully implemented the 3DFX Voodoo 1 in SpinalHDL for FPGAs, addressing bugs and timing issues encountered during the process.
- The project and detailed write-up are available on GitHub, making it a valuable resource for enthusiasts of 1990s retrocomputing and hardware design.
- Although 3DFX was eventually acquired by Nvidia, their Voodoo GPUs remain iconic, and original cards can still be upgraded with additional memory for improved performance.
