Early last year, a vintage 3dfx Voodoo5 GPU was sold at auction for $15,000. Any prototypes of 3dfx hardware are part of timeless computing history, as the company and its assets were sold to NVIDIA after it went bankrupt in 2000. Before this ignominious end, however, 3dfx was one of the first and best known names in consumer-accessible 3D acceleration.

However, even in 2024, enthusiasts are not forgetting about the 3dfx Voodoo and creating their own graphics cards. Oscar Barea publishes his progress in creating a custom vintage 3dfx Voodoo graphics card.

Now his project called Get VoodooX is in the working instance stage, which is based on the 3dfx VSA-100 GPU. This chip has been used in various 3dfx cards, including the 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 and Voodoo5 5500. According to Ash Evans, who is also involved in the project, the card uses a batch of VSA100 chips sold at auction for the Voodoo4. Despite the fact that the Voodoo4 4800 AGP worked with 64 MB of RAM, the Get VoodooX project decided to use 32 MB of RAM.

The project requires a lot of hard work and a real dedication to retro computer hardware, and some of us have fond memories of the 3dfx Voodoo era. Not many people want to revive archaic GPUs from before the start of the new millennium, let alone order boards to try to create functional graphics cards with new features.

The work here is really impressive, especially the new DVI video output support. Anyone who has dealt with analog VGA video knows that it has a much lower video quality than the DVI interface. The visual enhancement that DVI provides, even on this old hardware, looks quite nice.