3Dfx Voodoo Memory Upgrade - 8MB MOD (Part 2)

Рет қаралды 14,496

Күн бұрын

This is the second part of upgrading the memory of my Maxi Gamer 3D 3Dfx Voodoo 1.
In part one, I added 2 MB to the TMU chip to increase the texture memory. In this video, I complete the memory upgrade by adding another 2 MB to the FBI chip. This should allow this Voodoo card to render 3D scenes in a resolution of 800x600.
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0:00 Recap
1:33 The FBI mod
2:30 PCBWay
3:10 Memory configuration
4:36 Challenges: Support structure
7:42 Challenges: Memory and socket alignment
10:32 Checking the mod
11:03 3DMark 99
12:28 Unreal Tournament
13:01 NFS: Porsche Unleashed
13:48 Closing words

Пікірлер: 90

@3dfxvoodoocards6 Жыл бұрын

Like! The 8 MB Voodoo 1 should be capable of running older titles, from 1996-1997, fluidly at 800x600. Still a very impressive performance in NFS Porsche in 800x600 considering that the Voodoo 1 is 4 years older than the game.

@3dfxvoodoocards6 Жыл бұрын

Unreal would be a very good benchmarks for the 8 mb Voodoo 1 because it shows the minimum FPS. I guess that the improvements over the 4 and 6 mb versions will be more drastic in the minimum FPS and less so in the average FPS.

@retroianer3835 Жыл бұрын

A Unreal comparison video is here on KZfaq on a 3dfx fan channel and was produced in 2018. The 8MB version is also faster in Unreal than the 6MB, only the frambuffer memory is 2MB bigger than the 6MB version. You can also see the min, max and average fps

@Choralone422 Жыл бұрын

It's awesome to see a fully upgraded Voodoo 1 card! That being said it also seems fairly clear why there weren't many V1 cards that had more than 4MB of total RAM. The added cost of an extra 2 or 4 MB of RAM was quite noticeable at the time. Plus while the V1 is able to drive a 800x600 output resolution with a RAM upgrade to the FBI chip. I'm sure in quite a few games the V1 just doesn't have enough pixel pushing power to make that resolution run at a consistently playable frame rate. Plus I'm guessing 3dfx also wanted the Voodoo 2's large increase in 3D pixel power, 8 or 12 MB of RAM and ability to play at 800x600 (or 1024x768 in SLI!) make for a big all around upgrade. Having a V1 cards with 8 MB of RAM be common might have led to some consumer confusion.

@supermario8416 Жыл бұрын

12:35 in Unreal Tournament if you disable Detail Textures (active only in Glide, inactive in D3D and OpenGL ) using the "preferences" command, the FPS will increase by around 30%.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Good stuff! That's what I am going to need for the benchmark videos! Thanks 👍

@mariusznowakowski2644 Жыл бұрын

Hello, this 8mb voodoo 1 mod will also work with the voodoo 1 4mb diamond card and voodoo 1 cards from other manufacturers or only with maxi gamer 3d.

@Chriva Жыл бұрын

Try tacking two corners of the sockets, place the board where it belongs and heat it from the backside until the sockets aligns, pull it off and solder everything properly.

@ImportRace Жыл бұрын

I had a voodoo 1 card when they came back in the days. Awesome card

@KyoshoLP Жыл бұрын

Very nice. I ordered some of your PCBs and am hoping to do this mod, as well. I greatly appreciate you including the details of the issues you ran into getting the sockets to fit. That should save me some headaches. Really looking forward to your future videos on this.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Awesome, thank you! If you need any guidance or more insights, please reach out. Happy to share and discuss!

@rodhester2166 Жыл бұрын

Great video.. thanks for sharing. Reminds me of my ati all in wonder pro that came with 4mb standard but I ordered it with the expansion to give it 8mb that was easily added via a slot on the card.

@christopherjackson2157 Жыл бұрын

Impressive mod. I admire how meticulous you are. Kudos :)

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Thank you very much! I have to admit, I had to google that word :)

@ctiborkoza8944 Жыл бұрын

Great Video

@tobias_off Жыл бұрын

Congrats for this successful second step. When I remember what frame rates were acceptable for me to play in this times, I would say both titles tested are very playable, also in 800x600. 👍

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Thank you! I use a Pentium III 1GHz at the moment, this may contribute to much better frame rates that would be possible back when the card was released. But I agree that Need for Speed definitely is playable. In UT the stutter are annoying when fighting bots - I wouldn't want to play at 800x600.

@tobias_off Жыл бұрын

@@bitsundbolts I did some thinking in my breaks. Perhaps your bottle neck is now the bus, which is not able to pump enough texture and/or frame data into the memory and the was the reason there were no 8MB cards on the market. If you can overclock the bus, perhabs there could be seen a gain and a evidence for my theory. ;)

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Maybe :) At the moment, I am playing around with different bus speeds. Planning my next video featuring a DOS game with software render and 3Dfx support. I will start recording footage only from today - as I finally settled on a story for the upcoming video.

@wishusknight3009 Жыл бұрын

The voodoo1 had issues with processors over about 400mhz for some odd reason. And it was also partly due to "hub" architecture chipsets like the 815/810 The best combination was to use a 100mhz FSB cpu on the BX chipset.

@tezinho81 Жыл бұрын

I remember 'clipover' chip upgrades just like these, to boost a 386 with a coprocessor, if I remember right. It was an awfully long time ago. This is a lovely clean, professional mod.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Thank you!

@CsendesMark Жыл бұрын

I remember playing SS2 on my Voodoo1 It was really picky about overclocking the card, so you might give a shot of it on 800×600!

@alexandrmozhaev6456 Жыл бұрын

Good video and awesome work! I think you may try Diablo2 in glide mode. Utility for choose between glide/dx/ogl modes write to log, what D2 needs 4 megs of texture ram.

@supermario8416 Жыл бұрын

I wonder what the results would be between the 4,6 and 8 mb versions in other games like Quake 2 and Unreal.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

This will be part of future videos. This card created probably a month of future work for me 😅 - not complaining though!

@enitialdesignslimited6425 Жыл бұрын

Unreal tournament was so fun

@koffeika_let2947 Жыл бұрын

Hah brother you did some upgrade your pc, that's powerful xd Ps. I love your video, that's very interesting for me

@BurningFlame1999 Жыл бұрын

Nice! What CPU did you use here ?

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Pentium III 1GHz. Same as in part 1.

@Kommunisator Жыл бұрын

I remember back from the time when I got my Monster 3D that a few games ran out of the box in 800x600. Iirc Mechwarrior2 was one of them, and also this futuristic hockey game, hyperblade. If I remember correctly, they were giving up the z-buffer precision to achieve this, so with this mod you should be able to have the resolution and the buffer, right? Though from a performance standpoint, it seems that what you might gain in texture fidelity etc... can overwhelm the single chip on the Voodoo1 quite easily. Then again, you really need a K6-2 or better to get the most out of a Voodoo2 too. Ah, the days when 15fps were called "fluid gameplay" :D

@cricketol Жыл бұрын

Did you plan to overclock and cool the chips?

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

For now I just placed a case fan on the card. But I could add heatsinks, try overclocking, and do some temperature measurements.

@lemagreengreen Жыл бұрын

This is a great mod, super clean and ultimate 1996 bragging rights if a little late :) Of course there is no benefit from a 4MB frame buffer if the TMU cannot realistically push pixels fast enough for the higher resolution, it is however a neat thing to have available and I don't think many will have seen a Voodoo1 in 800x600 before, that was something that people bought Voodoo2's to do (and SLI Voodoo2's for 1024x768!). I would be curious to see 1996/1997/1998 games running in 800x600 to see how an 8MB Voodoo1 compared with an 8 or 12MB Voodoo2 though. Quake 1 or 2 would be the obvious choice for this.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

I already did compare a Voodoo 1 vs Voodoo 2 in combination with an AMD K6-2 @200 and @400 MHz. This could be a base to add more results and see how the extra memory affects the performance of the Voodoo1 with more memory.

@wishusknight3009 Жыл бұрын

Triple buffering is now an option!

@RTDragonCommando Жыл бұрын

One game from memory that does NOT like higher texture memory amounts in glide is Interstate 76. You had to play it on a card with 2mb of texture memory or just run software, it didn't work right on later voodoo cards either. The result was crazy texture corruption, wheel textures on dashboards and such. Like the game couldn't map properly with the extra address space available.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Thanks for sharing. I will try to get a copy of this game and check it out.

@Stratotank3r Жыл бұрын

Auch PArt2 ist ein wahrer Genuss für Voodoo Freunde! Bei meiner V1 waren Nuclear Strike und Moto Racer dabei. Ich selbst habe mir Autobahn Raser gekauft und der Unterschied zw. Software und V1 war bombastisch. Leider war das Spiel eher naja. Vielleicht läuft Insane oder Midtown Madness auf der 'Karte. Wenn du kannst, schau mal was die Velocity 1000 mit der höheren Taktrate bringt da sie ohne die zweite TMU auch nur eine V1 auf Speed ist.

@fungo6631 3 ай бұрын

The stock Voodoo 1 could also run at 800x600 but you had to disable Z-Buffering.

@luca6819 Жыл бұрын

I wonder if so mething similar is possible on a voodoo 2, i think to remember that in the specs it would support up to 20mb or something of memory (not to be confused with the sli on a single cards that had 16 or 24 mb)

@MrKillswitch88 Жыл бұрын

Really looking forward to when someone does this to a Voodoo 2 giving each TMU 8MB each even though according to documentation they do support up to 16MB.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

I have not seen anybody doing this - so, chances are that it cannot be done. I am an absolute noob, but I wouldn't mind trying. Just need to find pinout diagrams of those TMU chips...

@MrKillswitch88 Жыл бұрын

@@bitsundbolts Thing is someone already done these types of mods back in the 2010s but never to the fullest extent. This was pretty much how it got started modding later VSA era cards such as the V5 5500.

@vswitchzero Жыл бұрын

Great work on the second mod! I had a 6MB Canopus Pure3D back in the day, but I've never seen an 8MB V1 before. I'd be curious to see what framerate you could get from older titles like GLQuake at 800x600. I seem to recall about 30FPS being the average at 640x480.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Thank you! You were one of the lucky ones back then :) For about 20 years, my believe was Voodoo1 = 4MB. Those Canopus Pure3D and Skywell cards are super rare and expensive today. I am working on some benchmark videos, GLQuake will be part of it!

@vswitchzero Жыл бұрын

@@bitsundbolts Awesome! Looking forward to it 🙂

@valentine_puppy 9 ай бұрын

Is it the games or is it the memory controller in the GPU that needs to be told the GPU can handle the higher memory.

@TheRasteri Жыл бұрын

I should do this to my maxi gamer 3d...

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Perfect task for a rainy day :)

@ichemnutcracker Жыл бұрын

I seem to remember being able to overclock my Diamond Monster3D Voodoo 1 by a significant margin back in the day (I don't remember the exact amount, but I think it was ~50MHz higher). That might be enough to restore enough of the performance you lose at 800x600 to make games playable again.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

The Voodoo has a base clock of 50 MHz for core and memory, not sure how much higher the card can go. I am a bit concerned to damage the card if pushed too far, but 10-20% may be doable. I have no idea yet, but I probably will look into overclocking.

@ichemnutcracker Жыл бұрын

@@bitsundbolts Yeah, if the base clock is 50 MHz, then I probably didn't get a 50 MHz overclock on top of that, but I do remember being shocked and surprised at how far I was able to take it. Definitely something worth looking at. I think the first Voodoo chips were well known, back in the day, for overclocking like champs (kind of like how the old Celerons could practically double their clock before breaking a sweat). edit: I looked into this, and I must be mistaken. One source I found said they only managed to get 7 more MHz out of it before getting garbage on the screen. Perhaps I was thinking of the Voodoo3? Odd, though, because I distinctly remember using thermal epoxy to add a heatsink to my Voodoo1 because I had overclocked it in order to skip the Voodoo2 generation (distinctly because it was my first time ever doing something like that).

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

I've heard (not tried) that Voodoo3 were good overclockers. Especially the lower clocked models like the Voodoo3 2000 PCI.

@stefankoopmans2200 Жыл бұрын

@@bitsundbolts I always clocked the hell out of those cards back in the day, never ever got one damaged, don't remember exact clock speeds but as always milage may vary. I also had 6 Voodoo2 12MB cards in 1999 and put heatsinks on all the chips to keep them a bit cooler. Often clocked around 120+ MHz or so. But again, overclocked too far and they simply crash, no big deal. When you go into voltage modding that is where things can die on you but I never did that with the Voodoo cards. Voltage modding P2's were great though. You need to get hold of the PII 300 SL2W8, which was essentially a P2 450 with the busspeed set to 66MHz. Change it to 100Mhz in bios and you have a stable PII 450MHz. I had mine clocked at 504MHz (4.5 x 112) . Another great CPU from that era is the Celeron A 333Mhz, same deal, 66MHz bus to 100MHz and you have a 500MHz Celeron. Sometimes needed a voltmod though, if the motherboard did not have OC features you could tape off some pins on he Slot1 contacts to raise the voltage. Really neat stuff, had lots of fun back then when i was about 17 years old :) Ok I'm rambling... great mod sir! Love the content.

@ATSNorthernMI Жыл бұрын

The geometry engine doesn't need alot of frame buffer memory because the architecture is limited. The biggest issue with these cards were storing textures and increasing texture unit memory would allow the card to display higher resolution because there was enough texture memory but you end up with a bottleneck of the architecture. Just like buying a 12gb 2060 that performs the same as the 6gb version because the architecture can only do so much per clock. I would love to see what you could do with a voodoo 3 or 5 in giving the GPU more texture memory. My first voodoo was a voodoo2 that had 12mb of vram. It would be sweet to see what the voodoo could do with way more memory as 3dfx was a pioneer of graphics and wished they could have remained independent and not sell out.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

I don't know if it is possible with Voodoo3+, but it technically should be possible to bring the Voodoo 1 to 8MB TMU - same as with the Voodoo 2. This is based on 3Dfx documentation that I have seen. Unfortunately, I didn't find any document that describes the pinout of the TMU chip. With that, it could be possible to determine if it actually would work. I don't want to risk the only Voodoo 2 I have soldering memory on random pins. But it would be cool to have a Voodoo 1 with 12 MB and a Voodoo 2 with 20 MB. Just for fun.

@AceMcCrank Жыл бұрын

Could you stack more of these modules for an even higher memory option? Also, what kind of overclocking could you achieve with a heatsink mod?

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

The stacked memory chips require an address line from the TMU. Another row would require the same. I am actually searching for a pinout diagram of the TMU chip. So far, my search was not successful. But, in theory, you could probably stack those PCBs providing the TMU supports it. There are many pins that are not connected. Some are for SLI and some may be unused memory address lines... I may check overclocking capabilities some day.

@NVMDSTEvil Жыл бұрын

might have been easier to place the sockets on the 3dfx card, put glue on them, then set the expansion board onto them and wait for glue to set.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Yes, you are absolutely right. I have a second revision of the board coming that would encourage doing exactly what you describe. Follow-up video should come some time in March.

@barrozo24 Жыл бұрын

hello nice video and nice content for 3dfx!! but you should tested the card with correct "era" games like 1996/1997/early mid 1998 games to see the real difference of the memory!! i know you tested 1999 games to see if the card runs on 800x600 but a teste with proper "era" games would be nice !!!!

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Will do in upcoming videos.

@ironhead2008 Жыл бұрын

Can you try Tomb Raider with the original Voodoo Graphics patch? It'd be interesting to see if 800x600 is playable. Mechwarrior 2 might also be a really good test, supposedly the guys at FASA were amazed at the speed the game ran in Glide mode (sort of a hint of things to come if you ask me). Too bad boards with SLI fingers are unobtanium, I imagine doubling the ram on those things might show some impressive results.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Tomb Raider is already on the list. MechWarrior wasn't. I will try it as well and see what it is all about with those speed gains.

@nalinux Жыл бұрын

I think Tomb Raier 1 is hard coded to 512x384 or 640x480 max. It also has a 30 fps limit. So with a simple Voodoo 1 you get the maximum perf this game can have.

@jirja3192 Жыл бұрын

May I ask how is it with temperature? TMU of 6MB Voodoo1 Canopus - Pure 3D had a heatsink with fan on.

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

I think temperatures should be the same independent of memory configuration. But that's just an assumption. I could imagine that with more memory, those cards could be used in combination with faster CPUs (8mb Voodoo 1 can render 800x600 - although poorly). That would max out the Voodoo card and a heatsink is probably a good idea. Unfortunately, I traded this Voodoo card for a 486 motherboard - I have to make a new modded card soon :)

@irwansutanto5202 Жыл бұрын

so can you stacking more maybe 16 mb ? or even more crazy stack to 32 mb 🤪

@rmoog1019 Жыл бұрын

And what are the cooling consideration?

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

The memory chips do not get hot on the Voodoo card. Nothing to worry about.

@rmoog1019 Жыл бұрын

How would I go about using this mod if I modified my Voodoo card to have memory sockets?

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

Maybe solder the TMU/FBI wires to the socket and use 1MB memory chips. I don't know if this works, but I wonder why it wouldn't. In that case, you do not use this mod. This is for socket-less Voodoos only.

@colonthree Жыл бұрын

The FBI-chip...? ;w;

@pirncedark Жыл бұрын

you must try 3d labs cart

@memadmax69 Жыл бұрын

Now can you do the same thing to a Voodoo 2/3?

@lemagreengreen Жыл бұрын

There was some 16MB Voodoo2's wasn't there? or am I just imagining that... it has been a long time.

@Tylonfoxx Жыл бұрын

Voodoo 2s came in 8 and 12 meg versions, with 2 or 4 megs per TMU respectively - the framebuffer unit always had 4 megs. The Quantum 3D Obsidian 2 had a 16 MB (and 24 MB) version - but those were effectively SLI cards to be installed in a single slot - they had a 2nd V2 chipset with RAM tacked on with a daughterboard. According to the spec, the V2 TMUs can theoretically take up to 16 MB per chip - The Banshee did exactly this, and was otherwise a 1-TMU chip with 12 MB wired into it

@bitsundbolts Жыл бұрын

I guess I need to get a Banshee and see where those memory modules are connected to. Then we could figure out where the extra 4 MB connect to. Unfortunately, I do not have a Banshee - yet...