Voodoo Graphics

Voodoo Graphics broke into the market of 3D gaming accelerators, immediately winning the love of all gamers. It was this set of chips that showed us that 3D on a gaming computer is possible, and that it doesn't cost that much. Many will try to object to me, saying that at that time cards on Voodoo Graphics cost crazy money. Remember what the exchange rate of the ruble against the dollar was then. It is for this reason that cards on Voodoo Graphics were eagerly bought by gamers all over the world.

Voodoo Graphics is a 3D accelerator consisting of at least two chips - FBI (Frame Buffer Interface) and TMU (Texture Mapping Unit). The first chip is responsible for working with the PCI bus, rendering and for basic 3D functions, and the TMU does everything related to textures. Theoretically, Voodoo Graphics can have multiple TMUs, but only one is actually used. Each of the TMU chips supports up to 2 megabytes of EDO DRAM, and the FBI supports up to four megabytes.

Features of Voodoo Graphics

Voodoo Graphics can process up to 1,000,000 polygons per second and display up to 45 million pixels per second. Since Voodoo Graphics is a 3D accelerator, the 2D part is completely absent from it. That is, a separate 2D video card is required for its operation. It is because of this that there is no possibility of hardware rendering in the window. Here it is worth mentioning that there is no possibility of hardware rendering, since in the Glide library version 3.0 the possibility of emulating rendering in a window was implemented.

The quality of the resulting picture now, of course, would not impress a gamer spoiled by HalfLife 2 and high screen resolutions, but for 1997, after sprite-pixel graphics and low-resolution textures, the quality of such a picture, and most importantly, the speed with which it was processed, seemed simply fantastic . The picture was rendered in 16-bit color and this drawback was present in all Voodoo accelerators, but in those days it was not a big minus yet. But the Voodoo Graphics chipset had a unique Edge AntiAliasing feature that eliminated the so-called "ladder effect". This was the very ideal smoothness of the textures.

Another great advantage of Voodoo Graphics cards was its very good performance for those times even on slow computers, since CPU resources were not used to process graphics. The accelerator core frequency was 50 MHz, but if desired, it could be overclocked to 60 MHz. The memory frequency was also 50 MHz. In comparison with modern maps, this, of course, is completely frivolous, but for that time it was more than enough.