It took him 4 years, but the result is there: developer Dylan Barrie built, in his free time, an impressive Graphic card capable of running Quake at 60 frames per second.
What if, in these times of crisis, it was possible to create your own GPU at home? This is the crazy bet that video game designer Dylan Barrie took on. Working in the video game industry for 14 years, this computer enthusiast developed the FuryGPU graphics card, not without difficulty. Afterwards, he decided to share the fruit of his labor on his blog.
FuryGPU, an open source and homemade graphics card
An essential component of a central unit, the graphics card’s mission is to enable images to be displayed on our screens. We have all heard of the essential brands in the field, such as NVIDIA or Intel. Although the GPU market is doing well, it is clear that we do not always know how these devices work. This is why an open source project like FuryGPU is so interesting.
Building a graphics card from scratch is a real technical challenge. Dylan Barrie knows something about this, having been documenting his progress on YouTube for over a year. The developer first created his own printed circuit board and integrated systems on modules, a PCI-Express 4 connector as well as HDMI and DisplayPort ports. To carry out his project, he also had to learn, among other things, the SystemVerilog language.
A complex, but rewarding project
In his blog, Dylan Barrie indicates that “Designing the schematic and developing this graphics card, even with a large portion of the FPGA circuitry integrated into the SOM, was a herculean effort”. However, creating the Windows drivers proved to be the most difficult part of the project. The developer had, in fact, to “design a custom graphics API to communicate with the GPU and create Windows kernel drivers for display and audio”. However, his efforts have paid off: FuryGPU is now able to run the Quake game smoothly, as we can see in a recent video.
Of course, it won’t be tomorrow that we will see FuryGPU on the market. But that does not detract from this true technical feat. To find out more about this extraordinary graphics card, simply read the blog dedicated to the project. The latter opened its doors less than a month ago and its entries are already full of useful lessons.
Source : XDA
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