The 3dfx VoodooX project gets dressed in white for Christmas

A new PCB and minor bugfixes for a slowly progressing custom 3D accelerator

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In a nutshell: The 3dfx Interactive brand is long gone, but its legacy lives on through custom redesigns like the VoodooX, which pay homage to the legendary PC hardware product line. The creator of VoodooX was forced offline for a few months but is now nearly ready to resume work on the card's design and test whether the latest changes have improved performance.

Oscar Barea has been working on the VoodooX card for a few years now. The 3dfx hardware enthusiast aims to design, develop, and build a fully functional Voodoo video card based on the VSA-100 chip – the final 3D accelerator developed by 3dfx before the company was acquired by Nvidia. Barea is one of the few resourceful developers who never forgot 3dfx Interactive, the company that revolutionized PC gaming graphics with its groundbreaking 3D hardware acceleration technology.

For almost a year, Barea had to put the project on hold as he remodeled his house, leaving him without access to his "lab room" for more than eight months. Recently, he resumed work on the VoodooX, building a new version of the card featuring HDMI, DVI, and VGA interface support. The updated design also boasts a sleek white PCB, which Barea describes as a fitting "Christmas design" in one of his latest tweets.

With the latest build, Barea managed to fix minor bugs in the VoodooX design and rerouted the memory signal for improved performance. Barea now plans to test the updated 3D accelerator to ensure it works as intended and to evaluate its performance using demos and games.

Barea began designing and testing his VoodooX card in 2022, using brand-new VSA-100 chips that had never been used in pre-existing graphics cards. Earlier this year, he mentioned testing a switch to toggle the memory configuration for each VSA-100 chip between 32MB and 64MB. Official VSA-100 specifications reportedly support up to 64MB per chip.

The VSA-100 chip – where VSA stands for Voodoo Scalable Architecture – was the most powerful 3D accelerator ever developed by 3dfx. The company intended to compete with Nvidia's GeForce line of GPUs, but the few VSA-100 cards that made it to market (Voodoo4 and Voodoo5) failed to sell enough units to keep the company afloat.

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Nvidia completed its acquisition of 3dfx's assets and intellectual property in 2002, while the original company officially declared bankruptcy on October 15, 2002. Nvidia refused to provide technical support for 3dfx products, but the community stepped in after the 3dfx driver source code leaked in 2003.

Now, decades later, 3dfx enthusiasts like Barea are still finding new ways to revive and innovate with this once-obsolete graphics technology. Meanwhile, PC emulators such as PCem, 86Box, and DOSBox-X offer a quick and "easy" way to run classic 3dfx-compatible games within properly emulated Windows or DOS environments.