3dfx

3dfx is the company that produced the Voodoo chipset, the first successful consumer 3D chipset for the PC.

Status

Supported cards

3dfx Voodoo5
3dfx Voodoo4
3dfx Voodoo3
3dfx Voodoo Banshee
Velocity 100/200

Unsupported Cards (2D only):

3dfx Voodoo2
3dfx Voodoo1

Voodoo1/Voodoo2 use Glide2 and very different interfaces to later cards. While it is not impossible to write DRI modules for Voodoo1/2 the hardware is not designed for windowed 3D

Alan Cox has a glide-free XFree86 driver for Voodoo1/2 here. This driver has been integrated into Xorg.

Important notes:

3dfx is now defunct.
Hardware acceleration is only supported at 16bpp on the Voodoo 3 and the Banshee.
16bpp and 24bpp are supported on the Voodoo 5.
The driver lacks a current maintainer.
The driver needs significant work.
SLI is currently not supported. We are looking for volunteers to complete the SLI work. Note that this is quite difficult to complete.
AGP support in your kernel does not matter to the 3dfx driver, as it doesn't use AGP on Linux/BSD.

The tdfx driver uses the Glide library as a HAL, so that needs to be installed before building. This should be supplied by your distribution, but if not the build process goes like this:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/glide co -r glide-devel-branch Glide3
cd Glide3
./chores.3dfx --clean --generate
./configure --help
./configure # options here
./build.3dfx
su
(enter root password)
./build.3dfx install

The Glide build is known to be touchy. Gentoo users will want to say export WANT_AUTOMAKE=1.7 before running chores.3dfx. If this branch doesn't build for you, you may have better luck by checking out the Glide trunk by omitting -r glide-devel-branch from the cvs command. You'll need nasm installed in order to get the optimized assembly code.

Good luck.

Future work

Glide is very fragile, and using it as a wrapper layer means that the tdfx driver doesn't look much like the other drivers at the source code level. This makes the tdfx driver rather hard to maintain. We should rewrite it to talk to the hardware directly.

Currently no one is working on this.

Specifications

You can get them at http://www.medex.hu/~danthe/tdfx/.

Note: this link is now dead. It's mirrored on web.archive.org at: http://web.archive.org/web/20050311015540/http://www.medex.hu/~danthe/tdfx/.

CategoryGlossary, CategoryHardwareVendor