Legendary 3dfx Voodoo2 GPU Spotted Running Quake 2 On Ryzen 9 9900X PC
The madman in question for today's story is handsome Romanian gentleman Omores, a retro tech enthusiast who has posted many times before about classic 3dfx hardware. His experiment in his latest video was to see if he could get an original 3dfx Voodoo2 accelerator working on a modern machine. If you recall, the Voodoo2 is not a full-featured graphics card; instead, it is purely a 3D accelerator, and has to be used alongside a regular graphics card.
It turns out, this actually makes the job a little easier. Standard PCI graphics cards want to use a feature known as Bus Mastering, where they essentially take control of the PCI bus so that they can perform DMA transfers to system memory. The external PCI to PCI Express dock that Omores is using doesn't play nice with Bus Mastering graphics cards, although he notes that it's possible that the problem is because the DVI cable he is using is too long. Yes, the DVI cable—it's not being used for video here, but rather the Startech PEX2PCI4 external expansion system uses it for running PCI Express externally to the PCIe to PCI bridge in the box.
Omores goes over this detail in this video, where he shows his first attempts, which involved running Windows 98 on his Ryzen 9 system, natively, bare metal. Shockingly, it works, as does the Voodoo 2, which puts up extremely GPU-limited performance, as you might expect. Voodoo 2s normally stop scaling with CPU performance around 500 MHz; his AMD Ryzen 9 9900X is more than ten times faster than that by raw clock rate alone.
After that, he tests on his setup on Windows 10 32-bit. Windows 10 was of course the last version of Windows to include a 32-bit release, and that's necessary because there were never any 64-bit drivers released for the 3dfx Voodoo hardware; 3dfx went under as a company long before x86-64 even existed. This also works surprisingly well, although he has to patch the 3dfx drivers because they don't work natively in NT-kernel OSes (including NT, 2000, XP, and all later Windows releases) due to a memory-mapping bug.
Finally, the test you clicked on this post to see: Windows 11 23H3 running Quake II on a Ryzen 9 9900X and a 3dfx Voodoo 2. Yes, he got it working. The secret ingredients were this: his StarTech PCIe to PCI dock, the patched Windows 2000 drivers from above, and then a special driver shim written for Windows 64-bit by Ryan 'Colourless' Nunn, also known as Colourless Dragon. Colourless is a well-known name among 3dfx enthusiasts, but our author has to admit that even he didn't know about the 3dfx GlideXP project for Windows XP 64-bit.
Naturally, installing this Jenga-like tower of driver hacks requires disabling Windows 11's driver signature enforcement, but after doing so it seems like it was relatively smooth sailing. At least, Omores doesn't go over any particular issues he had with the Voodoo2-on-Windows 11 configuration. He did also try SLI mode—that legendary feature that let users connect two Voodoo 2 cards for double the performance—but it seems like his Startech dock doesn't play nice with both cards, unfortunately.
Should you try this yourself? Probably not. If you want to play a game that runs best with 3dfx Glide, chances are there's a user patch to either apply a Glide shim (like dgVoodoo) allowing you to run it on other GPUs, or otherwise a mod like the DirectX 10 renderer for Unreal Engine 1 games, such as Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex. Alternatively, you can use 86box, which includes 3dfx Voodoo emulation and doesn't require you to buy a $470 PCI to PCI Express adapter.
Still, our very dusty hats off to Omores and his ingenuity. This is a cool project, and it's very entertaining to see the Ryzen 9-powered Voodoo 2 card absolutely crush classic benchmarks—at least, as well as a Voodoo 2 can do. Check out his video above for the full story.
