GoKawiil
Tech News
On October 11, 1999, Nvidia shipped the GeForce 256, the first product it labeled a 'GPU,' featuring a hardware transform-and-lighting engine. Offloading graphics work from the CPU wasn't new—Commodore and 3dfx had done similar things earlier—but Nvidia coined and popularized the GPU term with this release. The card particularly benefited systems with weaker CPUs like low-end Celerons.
An independent hardware developer has extended their z486_MiSTer project, a software-defined 486 PC built on FPGA hardware, by adding a working recreation of the original 3dfx Voodoo Graphics (SST-1) chip called zSST. Combined into a system dubbed z486 XL, running on a Xilinx KV260 board at 100 MHz, the setup can run period DOS games like Tomb Raider using their original 3dfx renderer.
Developer Daniel Palmer has written new patches for Linux's Tdfxfb driver that let the kernel initialize 3dfx Voodoo3 graphics cards even on systems lacking a standard BIOS, such as the Amiga 4000. Palmer used AI assistance to read data directly from the card's own BIOS to force it out of an 'unbooted' state and produce a video signal, and the code is set to ship in Linux 7.3. He is also extending the work toward Voodoo4/5 support and Voodoo3 emulation in QEMU.