It is quite common to see some Internet users seeking to relive the good old days by buying old equipment to see what functions it can have today, or by implementing it out of pure nostalgia of having a collector’s item. And it is that the cards chart Voodoo They have a great history behind them, having come to dominate the gaming graphics market a few years ago, introducing technology that, although we don’t use it today, changed the industry a lot for a time.
In the IT industry, there are a large number of companies that made great contributions, but due to various problems or inability to maintain innovation compared to other companies, they eventually disappeared . The creator of cards chart Voodoo is one of those companies that, after being present in the market for eight years, decided to cease operations in 2002, leaving an area in which they had great proposals to other companies in the sector.
A GPU from the past reborn today, the Voodoo 4 returns, now integrated into a laptop
When we talk about graphics cards we usually always think of NVIDIA, AMD and even on some occasions Intel, but a large number of companies have brought this type of expansion cards to what they are today. And among these companies, it is necessary to highlight the creators of Voodoo, because for the time they offered quite good performances, obviously taking into account the limitations that existed at the time at the technological level, since they obviously have no comparison with current systems.
Today, a GPU from this brand arrives 24 years later, and a mud decided to check how this component works in a current system, by modifying a series of parameters to see if this graphic is capable of working years later. This modder removed the VSA-100 chip and other associated components in the GPU Voodoo 4installing it on the MXM expansion board he created, adding an FPGA to support the necessary hardware and software connections, and connecting it to a laptop for use.
In terms of performance it obviously doesn’t offer much, since it normally operates at 166 MHz, but even in a component of this type a higher speed can be applied. overclock to improve its functionality, and thanks to this it managed to double the video memory from 32 MB to 64 MB and increase the core clock speed by 15% from 166 MHz to 192 MHz.
Voodoo graphics, the first to introduce the SLI system
Currently, it is clear that graphics of this type are not new, because to begin with, they are not even manufactured given that the company that carried out their development closed its doors 22 years ago. But we must not forget that this type of graphics card was the first to implement the SLI function, that is, the possibility of connecting two video cards together to double the performance that they were capable of offering , although obviously the implementation of SLI is very different. 3dfx’s first Scan Line Interleave compared to the Scalable Link interface that NVIDIA introduced years later.
