PIXEL
PUSHERS
PAST
The graphics cards that helped define
PC gaming. By Jacob Ridley
HARDWARE
I
t’s easy to forget about where we came
from in PC gaming, especially when we’re
arguing over gigabytes of memory and
teraflops of performance. But there’s
actually a lot that we can glean from the
annals of GPU history – the colossal leaps in power that
GPUs have taken in under 25 years goes some way to
explaining why today’s top graphics card costs $1,499.
You have to walk before you can run, and there were
many attempts to nail an image resolution of just
800x600 before anyone could dream up the pixel count
required for the latest games at 4K. Yet you’d also be
surprised by just how many features so prevalent in
modern GPUs were first introduced back at the dawn of
the industry. But let’s start right at the beginning – when
active cooling was optional and there were chips aplenty.
3dfx Voodoo
1
It’s March, 1996 – England is
knocked out of the Cricket
World Cup by Sri Lanka, a
young boy celebrates his fourth
birthday (that’s me), and 3dfx releases
the first of what would be a couple of
game-changing graphics cards: the
Voodoo. It’s a graphics card looked back
on fondly by many in the PC Gamer
office. Clocked at just 50MHz and fitted
with a whopping 4/6MB of total RAM,
the Voodoo was clearly the superior
card for 3D acceleration at the time. The
top spec could handle an 800x600
resolution, but the lower spec was
capable of only 640x480. Despite its 2D
limitations, it would prove a highly
successful venture, and set 3dfx on a
trajectory into PC gaming fame.
Note: the 3dfx Voodoo is often
referred to as the Voodoo1, although
that name only caught on after the
release of the Voodoo2.
INFO YEAR: 1996 / CLOCK SPEED: 50MHZ / MEMORY: 4/6MB /
PROCESS NODE: 500NM
2A GRAPHICS CARD LOOKED BACK ON
FONDLY BY MANY IN
THE PC GAMER OFFICE