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Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

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Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#51

Post by ekelsen »

PinkMilkshake wrote: post #42
ekelsen wrote: post #4

The project is cool, but the LLM generated blog bothers my brain.

Are you sure this is AI? Normally when I read AI written stuff I zone out because it can go entire paragraphs without saying anything. The sentences here seem short and to the point. Their previous posts published before ChatGPT seem similar enough. Although, they have way more em dashes and this one has none, almost like they were removed on purpose... lol I don't know what is real anymore.

I'm fairly sure not because I have proof, but because of all the "not this, but that!" clauses.

If you spend time generating text with LLMs, there is a style that you learn to recognize pretty quickly.

Also, to be clear -- I'm not saying that we shouldn't use LLMs to help us produce the best text/prose we can -- but letting them just generate a lot of the text doesn't led to the best outcome imo.

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#52

Post by nazgulsenpai »

ashwinnair99 wrote: post #7

The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time. Someone rebuilding one from scratch is exactly the kind of project HN was made for.

I had a Voodoo3, can't remember the model number anymore, but my friend who had a TNT2 would often comment about how much worse the 3dfx's 16bit color looked vs the TNT2's 32bit. I could never tell a difference.

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#53

Post by rasz »

mmustapic wrote: post #49
ColonelPhantom wrote: post #47

Very cool! I am wondering one thing: how fast is it? Much of the "secret sauce" of the Voodoo is its high speed: a first-gen Verite or (God forbid) any ViRGE takes many more cycles for common operations like, say, Z-buffered pixels. I'm guessing this isn't fully cycle-accurate, but is it at least somewhat "IPC-accurate"? I'm guessing yes? But much of that was also derived from Voodoo's (for the time) crazy high memor…

The Voodoo was fast but also expensive, and you needed an additional VGA card. I think it was around USD 300 back then, that's more than USD 600 today and you'll still need another card.

$299 release price, down to ~$$199 in 1997 when Glide games started dropping. Consider Virge was aslo $300 and offered pathetic performance.

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#54

Post by rasz »

nazgulsenpai wrote: post #52
ashwinnair99 wrote: post #7

The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time. Someone rebuilding one from scratch is exactly the kind of project HN was made for.

I had a Voodoo3, can't remember the model number anymore, but my friend who had a TNT2 would often comment about how much worse the 3dfx's 16bit color looked vs the TNT2's 32bit. I could never tell a difference.

Voodoo 16bit was nicely dithered. TNT 16bit was ugly while 32bit looked good by sacrificing ~30-50% of performance.

Nvidia was very smart to advertise 16 bit performance _and_ 32bit quality at the same time :)

3dfx were stupid not to include token 32bit output option on Avenger chip (voodoo3). Every voodoo chip since first one has performed blending calculations in full precision and only dropped to dithered 16bit output to save on framebuffer ram, but that ram saving was meaningless by the time 16MB V3 released.

Re: Building an FPGA 3dfx Voodoo with Modern RTL Tools

#55

Post by pezezin »

KallDrexx wrote: post #50

Which actual FPGA is this running on? I've been extremely curious on this space and would love to know what it took to actually get this to run.

The author mentioned the DE-10 Nano on another comment, which is the original board used by the MiSTer project, based on the Cyclone V.
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