Superfan Looks to Breathe New Life into Decades-Old 3dfx Voodoo Video Card
What you’ll learn:
- A look at the legacy of 3dfx and its Voodoo series of video cards.
- Insight into Oscar Barea’s VoodooX Project.
- What’s next on Barea’s development list.
In the mid-1990s, the PC gaming industry was dominated by three video card companies: NVIDIA, ATI (now AMD), and 3dfx. The first two companies are well-known and still pump out the latest and greatest silicon. On the other hand, 3dfx was a short-lived venture that produced some of the most innovative technology the world had ever seen until they went defunct 22 years ago. With the introduction of its Voodoo line of video cards, 3dfx held a short-lived crown as the number one manufacturer of 3D acceleration hardware until it sold its assets to NVIDIA in late 2000.
Voodoo Cards Cast a Spell on the 3D Acceleration Industry
3dfx’s initial Voodoo cards only handled rendering in 3D, relying on a separate card to handle 2D workloads. This move enabled the company to gain superior 3D performance in modeling and gaming. The company’s success with the original Voodoo card led to the introduction of the Voodoo2, a video card ahead of its time when compared to the ATI Rage Pro and NVIDIA’s RIVA 128.
The Voodoo2 was architecturally similar to the original Voodoo, but it introduced a second texturing unit, allowing the hardware to draw a pair of textures on a single pass. This led to buttery-smooth frame rates in games such as Doom and the more advanced Quake, albeit with a few shortcomings, such as 16-bit 3D color rendering and an 800 × 600 resolution limitation.
The Voodoo2 was also equipped with a new technology known as SLI (scan-line interleave), which enabled two video cards to be connected for increased processing power. SLI is still in use today with NVIDIA’s new (2025) RTX 5090 series.
By the year 2000, around the time the Voodoo4 launched, 3dfx had some financial issues, and several creditors began to initiate bankruptcy proceedings. The once titan of 3D video cards pivoted by selling its assets to NVIDIA, which even took on a majority of 3dfx’s engineers to work on a new project called GeForce FX. ATI hired others to develop Crossfire in an effort to remain competitive with SLI. Shortly after, NVIDIA announced it would not provide tech support for 3dfx products, thus hammering the final nail in the 3dfx coffin.
As a testament to the 3dfx legacy, fans of the company began to release their own software updates to keep those old cards running. As of 2019, there are still forums dedicated to releasing firmware updates. One such superfan is looking to modernize the classic Voodoo card by building a functional prototype.
Card Play: Superfan’s VoodooX Project
Oscar Barea’s VoodooX Project is an ongoing labor of love that began in October of 2022 and is still in ongoing development. His VoodooX (see figure) is based on the 3dfx VSA-100 GPU, which was packed onto several 3dfx cards, including the Voodoo4 4500 and Voodoo5 5500.
According to Barea, the board is equipped with new VSA100 chips that were auctioned on eBay. Most of the hardware on Voodoo boards is typically sold as used from no longer functioning donor boards, which can be difficult to locate. Those chips let him add 32 MB of RAM to the card, with the possibility of extending it to 64 MB.
Unlike the original Voodoo video cards, VoodooX comes with both a VGA and DVI port, the latter of which didn’t exist on video cards from the 1990s. Some newer-generation cards still feature DVI alongside HDMI or even DisplayPort, such as NVIDIA’s RTX 2060 Super and 2070 series, which are still widely used today. Barea’s goal is to have a card that can take advantage of monitors with VGA, DVI or HDMI.
Barea also designed a newer white PCB over the traditional board he used for development. He said it addresses a number of bugs, and he routed the memory signal along a different path. Barea is looking at integrating a switch that will allow him to switch between 32 and 64 MB of RAM. However, the enthusiast states he hasn’t spent enough time as preferred to continue the board’s development in a timely fashion as he’s currently remodeling his home. He did manage to set aside some of that valuable time to start assembling the board, which looks promising.
As a 3dfx fan myself (I had a Voodoo5 5500, Voodoo3 2000, and Voodoo Banshee), it’s nice to see enthusiasts resurrecting old tech, especially one of the greatest video cards of a bygone era. Even the box art was incredible, which some fans will pay a premium for today.
However, the legacy of a company that went defunct two decades ago is still intact, and some 3dfx fans were holding out hope of seeing new cards from the company when a parody account emerged on X/Twitter in 2021. NVIDIA, which holds all rights to 3dfx, will never produce a video card under that name, which makes the VoodooX Project worth its weight in gold.
