The 3dfx Voodoo1

The story of the 3dfx Voodoo1

This article is the second entry in a series about the “3D cards of the late 90s running Quake”. On a 4MiB card, the RAM was divided equally with 2MiB for the TMU to store textures and 2MiB for the FBI to store the color and z buffer where values were stored respectively as 16-bit RGBA and 16-bit integer/half-float. After the SST1, the Voodoo2 doubled down on performance with 100Mhz EDO RAM, ASICs clocked at 90Mhz, and not one but two TMUs allowing to draw Quake multitextured frame (color + lightning) in a single pass[9].

Source: fabiensanglard.net