I wish I'd had this hot-rodded 12MB 3dfx Voodoo card to play Quake in 1997

I thought my first-gen 3dfx Voodoo card was amazing when it came out, with its smooth action in GLQuake at 640 x 480, but this new hot rod shows just how much untapped potential was available in this early 3D graphics card tech. It adds an extra texture mapping unit to the card, while tripling the memory from 4MB to 12MB, resulting in a huge increase in frame rates - I only wish I'd had this card back in 1997.

While these early 3D cards are now retro tech curiosities, with a tiny amount of rendering power compared to the best GPU designs of today, there's a thriving hobbyist community dedicated to getting the most out of them. We've seen a homemade 64MB 3dfx Voodoo4 4500 card, giving it twice as much memory as the original version, for example, and I also particularly loved Anthony Zxclxiv's recreated 3dfx Voodoo5 6000, providing access to the company's massive swansong graphics card that never quite made it to market.

This time, YouTuber PixelPipes has produced a card based on a blueprint by retro graphics card designer SDZ-Mods. The so-called Voodoo 4440H has a similar form factor to the original Voodoo card, with a small PCB that uses a standard PCI slot, and with the VGA in and outs on the back that enable you to hook it up to your graphics card. In the old days, you had a separate 2D and 3D graphics card, and you needed a loop-back cable to connect them.

However, the chip configuration is more like a 12MB 3dfx Voodoo2 card than a first-gen Voodoo card, with a pair of T-REX texture mapping units, rather than the single one on a standard card, and 12MB of memory instead of just 4MB, covering both the front and back of the card. As you can see in the video above, the difference in performance and capabilities is immense in the PixelPipes' 700MHz Pentium III test machine.

Running Unreal, for example, which always ran best in 3dfx's Glide API, as it gave you reflective surfaces, the machine only averages 20.1fps at 640 x 480 (in hindsight, I find it remarkable that I thought this was smoothly playable back in the day), but it averages a much smoother 32.2fps with the Voodoo 4440H. The difference in GLQuake is striking too, averaging 36.6fps with the standard card, but a much smoother 57.3fps on the modded card - just imagine if we'd had this tech for death matches in the 90s.

That extra memory also gives the modded Voodoo card the ability to run games at 800 x 600, a feat that was previously out of bounds for this card at the time. It copes with it well, though, largely thanks to that extra TMU chip. In the test, it runs GLQuake at 35.5fps, which is only 1fps slower than the standard Voodoo card at 640 x 480.

It might be old tech, but I really love to see what's possible with it. If you have a similar hankering for the old days of PC gaming, then check out my guide on how to build a retro gaming PC, where I take you through the process of building a Pentium MMX rig in a new case.

Did you ever have a 3dfx Voodoo card? Share your memories with us and other readers on our community Discord server.