The 3DFX Voodoo Lives Again In An FPGA
https://hackaday.com/2026/03/22/the-3dfx-voodoo-lives-again-in-an-fpga/Open linkView original on feddit.orghttps://hackaday.com/2026/03/22/the-3dfx-voodoo-lives-again-in-an-fpga/Open linkView original on feddit.org
My first game I played with the Diamond Monster 3D (Voodoo 1 4 MB) was Tomb Raider 1. I could not believe what was happening. It looked soooo much better, and the frame rates were so fucking high! That really was voodoo magic. I can't remember something other that magical in all my gaming history.
Same. Another similar breakthrough memory I had was the Gravis Ultrasound and hearing actual sampled instruments in the Ultima music. Before that game music was much more bleeps and bloops.
I had the same feeling, but with a TNT2 card. I first played Half-Life with software rendering, 320x240 in my fishbowl 14" monitor. Then a few months later I bought the TNT2 (M64, the cheap version), and began my 2nd playthrough at a glorious 640x480 with much better FPS. It was awesome.
Same.
Next I upgraded to 2×12MB Voodoo 2 (SLI with an IDE cable). I could play at 1024×768!
Best of times.
I miss my Voodoo 3 2000 AGP card.
Some games ran worse when I finally replaced it with a GeForce 2 MX400.
I noticed a large FPS drop in Diablo 2.
@HornedMeatBeast @AngelikaMerkel
Geforce 2 MX?!
The website is a bit busted for me, but I believe it was this one.
https://www.abit.com.tw/abitweb/webjsp/english/pt_main_back.jsp?pPRODUCT_TYPE=Video+Card&pMODEL_NAME=Siluro+MX400
@HornedMeatBeast oh yeah, I remember that “Siluro” models…btw a dead horse remains a dead horse even if marketing department beats the shit out of it 🤷♂️ and with Geforce 4 MX they went even harder on that. Brrrrr
"They're worth a bit now" partly because they were used in coin-op arcade games, and people who refurb those will buy them as spares.
Depending on whether you had a 3dfx or GeForce made playing Planetside a bit of a cheat. You could spot the cloaked infiltrators from anywhere as they would shimmer a nice ghostly white. Great times 😏
I had a Voodoo 2. I was salty at my parents that they got the 8 MB version instead of 12 MB. But I couldn't formulate my frustration because I didn't quite get the difference between system and graphics memory yet.
Still it was amazing how fast everything was. I spent hours just switching weapons in Jedi Knight. And Unreal was just drop dead gorgeous in Glide. No comparison to Direct3D or OpenGL.
And it included a demo of a rotating donut with bump mapping which would be toutet as this amazing new graphics feature decades later.
Probably quake 2. Quake 3 likely wouldn't have run the best on a 3dfx card but I think it would have run.
@TrickDacy @bonenode Could Quake 3 even run without a graphics card? It came out in late 1999 and was the best looking game at the time by far.
Without a graphics card? Of course not. Without 3d acceleration? Definitely not. Quake 3 was by far the most taxing game I was aware of when I came out. I barely saw any computers that could run it with maxed out settings until probably a year after it came out.
I had a Voodoo 5, which I bought about a month before 3dfx went tits up. Impeccable timing.
... today it's worth about 128GB of DDR5 ...
Holy shit I thought you were joking.
Yeah, I wanted to have it my collection since it came out, but it's not happening anytime soon, at least not until us millennials don't have anything better to live for.
I had no idea you could emulate old hardware like this on an FPGA, that’s so cool